With “Enclosure”, artist Rachel Rose brings nature, social history and magic to the Gladstone Gallery

Rose, 35, who lives on the Lower East Side with her husband, digital artist Ian Cheng (the two met in the art world in 2012 and married in 2017), learned of this period an bit by chance. She was reading a biography of Shakespeare which described her encounters with people displaced by this privatization of farmland. This context, juxtaposed with modern refugee crises in Europe and elsewhere, seemed premonitory. “It was like I was able to look at one of the roots of modernity at that point,” she says.

Almost two years after a planned, postponed and ultimately canceled debut at the Armory, Pregnant arrives in New York this winter via Gladstone Gallery, where it appears at the 21st Street location alongside new sculptures and “works with paint” by Rose and on loan from the Yale Center for British Art. In the first moments of the film, he switches between a marbled sky and a strangely tinted landscape, creating a tension between the wild and the artificially imposed. Rose is a filmmaker combining Malickian naturalism and artistic abstraction. “The quality of her films is so lavish,” says Courtney Martin, who has directed the Yale Center for British Art since 2019, to feel for them.

Pregnant was shot with a small cast and crew in the summer of 2018, at Kinderhook Farm in Columbia County, New York, an area recommended to him by a friend. Some 18th and 19th century British landscape painters helped inform his vision and will be part of the new exhibit. “We’re going to be showing Samuel Palmers and John Constables and Thomas Gainsboroughs alongside the movie itself,” Rose said. (As an undergraduate student at Yale, Rose took tours on Constable.) “I hope I feel less like the paintings prescribe a story, and more like they breathe artefacts that have a kind of synchronicity with the film. “

Most of the older works, Martin says, “showed these really bucolic scenes of few or no people; lots of foliage; green area; a perfect, natural, uncultivated sense of the world: blue sky, moonlight, harvest season…. And yet, almost every one of them is totally constructed. The landscapes owed their emptiness to the massive exodus of disenfranchised farmers, which Rose understood. “A lot of what she does in the film is having a keen visual understanding of what is not being said in these paintings,” adds Martin.