Rafaël Rozendaal: Almost There
May 1, 2015–May 21, 2017
Rafaël Rozendaal, screenshot of Almost There at sunrise, 2015
Rafaël Rozendaal's net art projects use the browser window to create abstract pictorial space. Many suggest painting, but they are all rooted in the digital vernacular that frames how we navigate the online environment. In Almost There Rozendaal uses black and white circular shapes—vaguely suggestive of the sun or full moon—to "eclipse" the Whitney's website. As visitors to whitney.org move the cursor over the black or white circle obscuring the web site, they cast spinning shadows or light over the page that obscure or expose its content, suspending it between legibility and illegibility, visibility and invisibility. With Almost There Rozendaal strives to capture the states between sleep and waking up—the moment when one stops thinking and starts dreaming (or the other way around).
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian artist who lives and works in New York and uses the Internet as his canvas. His artistic practice comprises websites, installations, lenticulars, writings, and lectures. His work has been shown at venues including the Centre Pompidou, the Venice Biennial, Valencia Biennial, Casa Franca Brasil Rio, TSCA Gallery Tokyo, Seoul Art Square, NIMk Amsterdam, and the Stedelijk Museum project space. It has been covered in numerous publications, among them Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Flash Art, Dazed & Confused, Interview, Wired, Artreview, Metropolis M, La Repubblica, and Vogue.
Sunrise/Sunset was a series of Internet art projects that marked sunset and sunrise in New York City every day from 2009 to 2024. All were commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a time frame of ten to thirty seconds.
Indicating the switch from day to night and vice versa in one specific location, Sunrise/Sunset projects played with the perception of time and space, underscoring the physical location of the Whitney Museum and the global accessibility of virtual space. The series was organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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