Artist Statement/ Biography

Rachel Garber Cole’s film and performance work is concerned with the flora of anxieties that roil around in our psyche, externalizing the intimacy of interior life in order to create new, fantastical, and surreal worlds. These worlds are highly theatrical, and employ a homemade aesthetic. Although she works primarily within the digital, Cole constantly reminds us of the tactile and the analogue: the physical process of creating images. She creates characters using papier-mâché, backgrounds out of construction paper, and shoots makeup and costuming in ways that allow the normally invisible materials of these masks to become visible, allowing us to see what has been built in an effort to paradoxically strip artifice away to get to the visceral.

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Rachel Garber Cole is a filmmaker and performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her short films and performance videos have screened locally and internationally, including Anthology Film Archives, Queens World Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, Sedona Film Festival, The Brattle Theater, Festival L’Inconnu, Bushwick Film Festival. Rachel also hosts a monthly Bring Your Own Film film/video open mic in Brooklyn. She is a recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Community Arts Fund, the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC) Grant, and has been granted residencies at Prairie Center of the Arts, The Studios of Key West, Crosshatch’s Hill House Artist Residency, and The Ucross Foundation.