Spatial Daydreams: Rebecca Rose's Collaged Stories

By @JustinWetch

Some of Rebecca Rose's earliest memories are of taking scissors to paper. She'd take her mother's modest collection of Life and Time magazines from the 1950s and 60s and cut them apart for collages, and she didn't ask first.

"My mom was startled at first," Rebecca says, "but upon seeing what I created from the clippings, that's when she realized, there's something here." That was the moment her mother understood who her daughter was. The aside arrives quietly: "She's long since passed, but we've made amends over it."

Nobody else in the family made art. Her parents and brothers were practical people, and Rebecca was the oddball, a little misunderstood. She has no theory for where her artistic pursuits came from. "Maybe my ancestors are coming through me," she says. "I have no clue, I am what I am, an artist through and through."

What she does know is that it started with collage, with cutting other people's images apart and arranging them into something that was hers. Decades later, after three full careers in three different materials, she's still doing exactly that. The scissors became a camera. The magazine clippings became hand-cut digital layers. The gesture never changed.

The technical side came from her father, a software engineer at Motorola who soldered chips and motherboards on the kitchen table. He put the family on Prodigy, the pre-AOL dial-up service, in the early 90s, where her three chat rooms were art, Disneyland, and Legos. Before that, in the 80s, he had them on ham radio, talking to people in Russia and Asia and South America. By the time the internet arrived, it "didn't feel like quite a big jump."

The other influence came from Disney, and it runs through her whole life. As a kid she read every book on Walt Disney she could find, and she became fascinated by the multiplane camera, a contraption from the late 1930s first used on the animated short The Old Mill. It stacked transparent animation cells in a tower with depth between them, then moved a camera through the layers to create parallax, the illusion of three dimensions from flat art.

She filed it away for forty years.

"It had a direct influence on what I do, how I do, and why I do it," she says now. The machine that made cartoons feel deep in 1937 is the conceptual engine of her work in 2026.

Rebecca went to university on a cello scholarship, dropped it, and chased a double major in mechanical engineering and art because she wanted to be a Disney Imagineer and design rides. Calculus ended the engineering half. She went all in on art instead, loading up on CAD, foundry, metalsmithing, and printmaking.

Her thesis predicted everything that came after. It was a thirty-foot walk-through installation of hand-printed, hand-cut flat prints arranged in three-dimensional space, so that the work stayed flat but felt 3D as you moved through it. She called it 2.5D, twenty years before she'd make the same thing on a screen.

The installation was too big to store. It lived in an airplane hangar between shows. So she shrank the immersive impulse down to cast-metal wearables, sculptures people could put on and experience life with day to day while worn, and spent twelve to fifteen years on that body of work, showing at museums, galleries, and Art Basel satellite fairs.

That chapter closed in 2020, and it closed because it was dangerous. Casting brass and copper throws off noxious gases, and there were molten metal spills, two thousand degrees, near misses that didn't quite burn the studio down. She decided it was time to carry everything she knew into a new chapter, coming full circle with the digital roots she planted in the late 90s.

"Everything before now informed what I'm currently doing," she says. The chapters were never separate. They were layers. Pun intended.”

A piece begins with daydreaming. She'll talk a loose stream of consciousness into a video on her phone, an esoteric ramble about a story, then storyboard the key frames she wants to hit.

Then comes the building. She cuts three to five hundred individual PNGs, sourced or AI-generated, refined by hand in Procreate, and arranges them in 3D with real depth between the flat layers. She assigns cameras and moves them through the scene, and the parallax between layers does the rest. "My spatial animations live between 2D and 3D," she says. "Like my 2.5D installations from 25 years ago." The multiplane camera, reborn.

Her figures are always faceless and grayscale, set against full Technicolor worlds. The storytelling ethos behind them was forged somewhere specific. Rebecca worked at Disney as an artist for eighteen years, managing eighty artists, while running her fine art career at the same time. There, the rule was hammered in: everything has a meaning, everything is included or left out for a reason, and the choices serve the larger story.

"Storytelling for me is above everything else," she says. Above beauty, even. "A lot of times my animations aren't pretty at all." She gravitates to cautionary tales, stories with a comeuppance rather than a tidy lesson, because life doesn't always end well and the hard passages are how a person grows. "I'm drawn to cautionary tales because it helps me grow as well as a human."

Somewhere past the three-quarter mark of a piece, control slips.

"I'm no longer in control, and I recognize that," she says. "The piece takes over itself, and I just become the vessel." She compares it to the chef in Ratatouille, the little cook in her hat telling her what to do, and she'll deliberately push her own head aside so the work can tell her where it wants to go. "That's when the best stuff happens."

The faceless figures are an invitation. She leaves them blank so any viewer can step in, hero one day and villain the next. When asked why she keeps returning to that, she traced it back to the installations and collaged wearables people used to walk through and put on, and then she went somewhere more honest.

"I'm gonna get vulnerable here," she said. "I admittedly am not good at that sort of social connection as myself as a person. It's something that I lack. And my artwork, by allowing my artwork to have that component, I feel helps make up for the lack within."

This is the thread under all of it. Every room she's ever built, the hangar installation, the wearables, the spatial collage you fall into, has been a way through a wall she struggles to cross in person. As a kid she roamed Disneyland alone with a Walkman, recording the hidden soundtracks in the grass, treating the whole park as a life-size art installation where everything meant something. She's been building places for people to step inside ever since.

This year is a milestone one. The National Gallery of Art held its first-ever open call, chose fifty artists from sixteen hundred, and Rebecca was one of them, reimagining Copley's Watson and the Shark with a focus on the rescue and the sailor who reaches for the drowning boy. It shows in the museum in July and mints as a 1/1 through @AOTMgallery. With Superchief and @8NAP_ART, she's making animations on Mayan mythology for Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum, including Xibalba, which walks the viewer through the treacherous caves of the underworld. And her Objkt Labs residency yields Behind the Blue Light, three cautionary tales about death and what comes after.

What she wishes people understood about her minted work is simple: the GIF thumbnail is not the full animation. Click in, turn the sound on, and watch it more than once. People keep telling her they find new things on the second and third pass, and the fuller story is in there for anyone who slows down enough to stay.

Rebecca shouts out the artists inspiring her lately: @coldie, a fellow collage artist she feels a kinship with; @danguiz, a storyteller who distills sprawling detail into a single frame the way Rockwell did; and Michelle Thompson, who works in vintage collage.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Rebecca recommends @coldie, @dangiuz, and @mich_tom.