Lake Valley is an enchanting eight-minute video by artist Rachel Rose. Rose mines themes and imagery from the history of children’s literature, inventively combining collage, found footage, and repurposed materials to create dream-like stories about loneliness, imagination, and longing for personal connection. Abandoned on a lonely day, an imagined, rabbit-like pet in Lake Valley leaves its family’s suburban home in order to look for friendship in the ethereal land of a nearby forest. Rose used imagery assembled from 19th and 20th century children’s books to create the work’s cel animation. She used this salvaged media to generate imagery with unusual appearances like a shirt made of animal skin or spaghetti made of hair. Lake Valley’s sound editing is similarly unexpected: actions are accompanied by recognizable but atypical sounds. Balancing notions of tedium, adventure, abandonment, and companionship, Lake Valley offers a sumptuous, transfixing storybook world that explores universal human fears and desires.
