Escape to ‘Lake Valley’ at Burlington’s BCA Center

The experience of Rachel Rose’s “Lake Valley” begins with taking off one’s shoes and walking across a plush carpet in a darkened room. Visitors to the video installation at Burlington’s BCA Center sit on ottomans or the floor, quiet and ready for story time. They are soon immersed in a colorful and comforting yet unsettling animated world, roiling with pattern and sound.

“Lake Valley” draws on imagery and themes from 19th- and early 20th-century children’s books, and it has the surreal, lonely quality of those stories. Think of The Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie-the-Pooh or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Watching the video brought to mind a childhood favorite this author had forgotten: a 1936 picture book called Phewtus the Squirrel, in which a beloved toy, usurped by a conceited new stuffed rabbit, goes on an adventure and is magically transformed into a real, wild squirrel.

Rose’s video has a story, but its plot is not the point. It features a pet — a kind of rabbit-dog-fox hybrid — from whose perspective we see a series of moments: being fed, an egg cracking, people leaving the house. When the pet goes for a walk, the landscape transforms: It becomes wild and lush, a Henri Rousseau-style jungle where the pet meets other creatures and eventually faces scary exploding fireworks. Just when its world is destroyed, the scene shifts into a framed landscape in the pet’s home, where it is once again safe but not necessarily happy. Meanwhile, a girl in the house dreams, eats and rides in the car to her dad’s office. Her dreams are detailed worlds in contrast to the sketchy outlines of other children in her waking life.

These hand-drawn animations are rich and stylistically varied — some made of patterned torn paper or collage, some simply but evocatively drawn. There is an overwhelming amount of color and texture that’s mirrored in the sound design. We hear things only a pet would: the swish of pants as someone walks, running water, low thrumming noises, haunting higher melodies.

“Lake Valley,” which was shown at the 2016 Venice Biennale, comes out of Rose’s research-based art practice, in which BCA curator Heather Ferrell is particularly interested. Ferrell said by email that she wants to present artists such as Rose “who are constantly learning new processes and using materials in inventive ways for each new project.” Each of Rose’s projects looks stylistically different and deals with different themes; each also takes at least a year to make.

For “Lake Valley,” the New York artist used a traditional process called cel animation, familiar from early Disney movies such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, drawing and physically layering elements such as cut paper on clear celluloid sheets to make each frame in the 12-frame-per-second, eight-minute video. She used thousands of pieces of older illustrations, which gives the video a varied visual texture and allows one object to melt seamlessly into another. This adds to the dreamlike quality of the narrative.

The team at BCA worked for six months with the artist and her gallery to mount the installation, which includes the carpet and specialized projection screen. Video installation can look deceptively simple, but it’s expensive and technically difficult to get right. Because of that, Vermonters are rarely afforded the opportunity to see internationally recognized works of this quality.

While “Lake Valley” centers on themes of loneliness and abandonment, it also borrows a baffling key feature of the best children’s literature: It’s often alienating to adults, while children love it and connect with it strongly. According to curatorial assistant Jacquie O’Brien, some kids from the BCA summer camps have been back to see the video three or four times, taking off their shoes and reveling in the experience of being somewhere apart from the rest of the world.

This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2024.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!