Rachel Stein's portfolio

Work samples

Shade Provider

2025

Shade Provider repurposes discarded plastics into a functional shade configuration, offering relief from heat while inviting the viewer to rethink everyday waste as objects of care. Positioned in a gallery window, the sculpture sparks conversation between inside and outside, inviting the passersby to consider the practical and playful potential of transforming discarded materials.
Feeling Tingly?

2024

Feeling Tingly? invites the viewer to explore sensation and perception in a world shaped by synthetics. This work encompasses video, sound, sculpture, and immersive installations that provoke curiosity, play, and disorienting pleasure.
ASMR Portals

2024

Inspired by the internet phenomenon of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), this series uncovers strangely satisfying moments through hypnotic sounds, textures, and visuals. Using visual effects, viewers are placed in a space between the real and imagined. The work encourages playful connections to our senses while blurring the line between the natural and synthetic.
Force of Nature

2021
Forces of Nature explores the transitory and mundane nature of everyday objects to create an anti-monumental quality, giving less empowerment to the material and more power to the forces of nature that move it. By place multi-colored plastic objects into a natural setting, I aim to create imagery that invites the viewer to analyze their personal association to the objects presented and to question its placement in the landscape - and by extension, their own personal impact on the environment.

About Rachel

Rachel Stein is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Baltimore, Maryland, who aims to activate the mind and body through immersive installation that encompasses video, soundscapes, and interactive sculpture. She invites viewers to question their own consumer reality and relationship with pleasure through sensory stimuli. Rather than trying to return to a pristine world, her work provides alternative ways of being-with the waste and pollution that we inherit. … more

View Rachel 's Resume

The Air is Plastic

The Air Is Plastic is an invitation to curiosity and pleasure. The work presents itself as a sensory experience, welcoming participants to move through and around the suspended plastic. To engage multiple modalities through visual, tactile, and auditory experiences, this work offers new sensibilities for reframing our bodies with plastic.

Shade Provider

2025
7'x13'x3'
Shade Provider repurposes discarded plastics into a functional shade configuration, offering relief from heat while inviting the viewer to rethink everyday waste as objects of care. Positioned in a gallery window, the sculpture sparks conversation between inside and outside, inviting the passersby to consider the practical and playful potential of transforming discarded materials.
Shade Provider

2025
Shade Provider repurposes discarded plastics into a functional shade configuration, offering relief from heat while inviting the viewer to rethink everyday waste as objects of care. This site specific installation was created in a Baltimore City park that is lacking adequate shade infrastructure.
Shade Provider

2025

Shade Provider repurposes discarded plastics into a functional shade configuration, offering relief from heat while inviting the viewer to rethink everyday waste as objects of care. This site specific installation was created in a Baltimore City park that is lacking adequate shade infrastructure.
The Air is Plastic

2023
10'x3'x3'
The Air Is Plastic is an invitation to curiosity and pleasure. The brightly colored strands invite the viewer to enter the work itself and consider the relationship between their body and these everyday materials. As the body moves through the piece, the plastics respond- brushing, rustling, layering into what sounds like a babbling river. Once pleasurably cocooned within, senses fully engaged, the outside world softens. The work creates a temporary refuge. Through this immersive experience, viewers are confronted with the reality of overproduction and invited to reconsider alternative ways of being-with the plastic waste that we inherit.
The Air is Plastic

2023
10'x3'x3'
Plastic Curtain

2022
9'x3'x2'
This work draws viewers into a moment of sensory bliss, acting as a threshold or transition, marking the boundary between one environment and another. The single-use plastic bags holds its own symbolic significance and invites viewers to reflect on the implications of our material world. As viewers linger through the single-use plastics, they are met with unexpected yet pleasurable sounds, textures, and visuals that offer new sensibilities for reframing our bodies with plastic.
Plastic Sound (Installation View)
Plastic Sound
Floating Plastic

Feeling Tingly?

Feeling Tingly? invites the viewer to explore sensation and perception in a world shaped by synthetics. This work encompasses video, sound, sculpture, and immersive installations that provoke curiosity, play, and disorienting pleasure.

Tingly Tunnel

Wood, Faux fur, LED flashlight, plastic hooks, fabric shoe covers
Gooey Entanglement

Glue, Borax, Water, plastic, foam bead, paper, faux fur, LED flashlight.

11” x 6”
Feeling Tingly? Installation View

Wood, Faux fur, fabric, audio, LED screen (single channel video)
Tube Portal (video still)

Single channel video still
Feeling Tingly? Installation View

Wood, plastic bag, foam mat, fabric, LED screen (single channel video), headphones, PVC, LED light, mini fridge, gelatin, food dye, foam bead, projector (single channel video), directional speakers
Squishy

Water, gelatin, food dye, foam beads

5" x 7" x 6"
Fridge Portal

Foam mat, fabric, headphones, PVC, LED light, mini fridge, gelatin, food dye, foam bead, projector (single channel video), audio

17" x 18.5" x 32”
Chroma Key Threshold

Fabric, projector (single channel video)

12’ x 14’
Slime Portal

Wood, Paint, Plastic Containers, Projection, Astroturf, fabric
Tunnel

Installation View

Feeling Tingly (continued)

Feeling Tingly?

Video Documentation of Installation

ASMR Portals

Inspired by the internet phenomenon of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), this series offers a new way to uncover strangely satisfying experiences in everyday moments through hypnotic sounds, textures, and visuals. Through the use of chroma key visual effect technique to superimpose a new background onto an original image. Within this framing, the viewer exists in an unknown spatial plane between real and fictional space. This work is intended to offer new sensibilities for reframing our bodies as interconnected with both the natural and synthetic.

Land Portal

2025

I’m compelled to find “portals” within the natural landscape, such as tree cavities, and juxtapose with sounds and visuals derived from synthetic objects. Through the use of visual effects, the viewer exists in an unknown spatial plane between real and fictional space, offering new sensibilities for reframing our bodies as interconnected with both the natural and synthetic.
ASMR Portals
ASMR at the Beach

One Channel Video, 2023
ASMR Sensitivity Test
Nonsense ASMR
The Air is Plastic

One Channel Video, 2023
My Hands Are Plastic

One Channel Video, 2023
ASMR Energy Flow
Walking on Plastic

One Channel Video, 2022
Plastic Tingles

One Channel Video, 2022

Forces of Nature

In this project, Forces of Nature, man-made objects are placed into a serene natural landscape - creating imagery that invites the viewer to question their own personal impact on the natural environment. Like a dance, my body moves with the plastic materials through the landscape with both tension and grace. The transitory nature of plastic creates an antimonumental quality, giving less empowerment to the materials and more power to the forces of nature that move it.

Wind

Video Still from Wind, 2022
Wind

Two Channel Video, 2022
Float

Photography, 2021
River Ritual (Install)

Installation, 2021
River Ritual

Two Channel Video, 2021

Insert Here

Creating installations has given me the freedom to work intuitively while exploring the idea of temporality and balance. In this project, Insert Here, I add my own objects to a space to give a space a splash of energy that it had not previously possessed. By playfully and precariously balancing objects in an environment, my hope is that they stay in place long enough for me to compose a photograph. While the positioning of sculpture is impermanent, the photograph is everlasting.