Peter Rose (NOT the ball player)

Peter Rose (NOT the ball player)
Produced by: Michael O’Reilly

Peter Rose is an internationally-recognized and critically-acclaimed experimental media artist (not Pete Rose, former member of the Philadelphia Phillies). He’s also something of a badass, which is not something you often hear associated with “experimental media artists”. Growing up near where the East River meets the Long Island Sound in New York, Rose often found himself outdoors. And quite near to the new Throgs Neck Bridge going up seemingly within reach of Rose’s boyhood home. Rose climbed that bridge without permission, the first of many unpermitted climbs of the bridges of New York. When we went out shooting with him in the woods below his house, he was easily the most limber of the entire crew, from a soon to be retiring cameraman to the intern along to help out. Clambering up hills and across streams, he left all of us in the dust.

That kind of upbringing does not seem like it would lend itself to work that explores heady conceptual video, new ways of seeing and hopefully “looking through time”. Rose was trained as a mathematician until he found the moving image. Here was a way, Rose thought, to be able to see the beginning, middle and end of something all at the same time. FRIDAY ARTS visits the gallery where a wide range of fascinating works Rose has created using the moving image has been installed. In the gallery show we get little sense of the bridge climbing extreme athlete, but rather we experience the extreme bending, warping and shaping of our “way of seeing”. We leave that gallery with the sense that we are in the presence of multiple viewpoints, and it is only up to us to decide which appeals to us most, and walk through it. Peter Rose has created the doors to these many faceted viewpoints and left them all open.

The Ghost in the Tunnel
Produced by Michael O’Reilly
Edited/sound design Ben Collins
Peter Rose relives a haunting yet beautiful moment of his life in modern exploration. This story captures the essence of some of his work with light, sounds, and caves.