Inner and outer nature: The video art of Mathilde Rosier

Unrestricted This essay offers an in-depth analysis of the creative practice of the French contemporary artist Mathilde Rosier (b. 1973), focusing specifically on her video works from 2001 to 2010. Rosier produces drawings, paintings, videos, sculpture installations, theatrical performances, and musical compositions that hover between the boundaries of truth and illusion, consciousness and unconsciousness, and the mythic and the (post)modern. Rosier’s inherently phenomenological work draws from Surrealist, Symbolist, and Romantic histories of art, but re-configures these movements’ aesthetic and philosophical concerns within a postmodern discourse by situating her viewers in the unstable position of historical self-awareness. Dream logic, perceptual deception, archetypal imagery, and mythical symbols frequent recur in Rosier’s practice to confound relations between history and the present, and between the object and its simulacrum. This text investigates many of these connections and the ways in which Rosier complicates them, while identifying the distinctive work that her art performs for its spectator.