Rose Rollin Pertofsky

Based between Los Angeles and New York, my practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and material experimentation. After graduating from Pratt Institute, I have continued to expand from painting into sculpture, doll-making, sewing, and immersive environments that viewers can’ nearly step into. 

Much of the work explores childhood, memory, and the strange ways we learn to understand the world. The space between innocence and understanding is especially compelling, where imagination becomes a survival tool and memories grow increasingly unreliable over time. These ideas culminated in my undergraduate thesis exhibition, Selves, named after a game my sisters and I created as children. We used our own bodies as dolls, inventing elaborate stories to make sense of experiences we couldn't yet explain. Returning to those memories led to handmade dolls, sculptural environments, paintings, and found-object installations that explore how incomplete understanding shapes the stories we carry throughout our lives. Rather than recreating memories exactly as they happened, the work attempts to translate the feeling of remembering, where details blur, forms become imperfect, and imagination quietly fills the gaps.

Research is as essential to the practice as making. Travel, conversation, teaching, and collaboration continually inform an interest in how different cultures preserve memory through craft, storytelling, toys, and everyday objects. Experiences in arts education, childcare, costume fabrication, and creative production have deepened an understanding of play, materiality, and the unseen labor behind making, continuing to shape both the work and the questions it asks. Film, music, literature, and poetry all influence the emotional atmosphere of the work. Stories that balance wonder with discomfort, beauty with imperfection, and fantasy with reality remain a constant source of inspiration. Whether sewing a doll, carving foam, painting on reclaimed wood, or constructing an installation, the same question continues to guide the process: How do the stories we create, and the ones we're told, become the people we are?