During her studies, Rist began making
super 8 films. with alterations in their colors, speed, and sound. Her works generally treat issues related to
gender,
sexuality, and the
human body. Her colorful and musical works transmit a sense of
happiness and
simplicity. Rist's work is regarded as
feminist by some
art critics. Her works are held by many important
art collections worldwide. In ''
I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much'' (1986) Rist dances in front of a camera in a black dress with uncovered breasts. The images are often
monochromatic and
fuzzy. Rists repeatedly sings "I'm not the girl who misses much", a reference to the first line of the
song "
Happiness Is a Warm Gun" by
the Beatles. As the video approaches its end, the image becomes increasingly blue and fuzzy and the sound stops. Rist achieved notoriety with
Pickelporno (
Pimple porno) (1992), a work about the female body and sexual excitation. The
fisheye camera moves over the bodies of a couple. The images are charged by intense colors, and are simultaneously strange, sensual, and ambiguous.
Sip my Ocean (1996) is an audio-video installation projected as a mirrored reflection on two adjoining walls, duplicating the video as sort of
Rorschach inkblots. Besides a television and tea-cups other domestic items can be seen sinking slowly under the ocean surface. The video is intercut with dreamlike frames of bodies swimming underwater and other melancholic images such as colourful overlays of roses across the heavens. Slightly abstract and layered the visuals invite the viewer to reveal its depth beneath the surface. Accompanying the video is Rist singing
Chris Isaak's "
Wicked Game". Her voice is starting of sweetly but becomes gradually out of synchronicity with the song, ending in the shrieking chorus of “No, I don’t wanna fall in love”. Rist breaks the illusion of synchronicity in the video with the asynchrony of the audio and captures the human longing for and impossibility of being totally in tune with somebody else.
Ever Is Over All (1997) shows in
slow-motion a young woman walking along a city street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a large hammer in the shape of a tropical flower. At one point a police officer greets her. The audio video installation has been purchased by the
Museum of Modern Art in
New York City. Rist's nine video segments titled
Open My Glade were played once every hour on a screen at
Times Square in New York City, a project of the
Messages to the Public program, which was founded in 1980. “I want to see how you see – a portrait of Cornelia Providori” (2003) is an audio-visual work spanning 5:16. The sound was created in collaboration with Andreas Guggisberg, with whom Rist often works with. The main subject is the
dialectical tension between macro and micro and how the continents are mirrored on the human body. The technical components are two to four layers of edited images, intricately cut and stacked on top of each other.
Pour Your Body Out was a commissioned multimedia installation organized by
Klaus Biesenbach and installed in the atrium of the
Museum of Modern Art in early 2009. In an interview with
Phong Bui published in
The Brooklyn Rail, Rist said she chose the atrium for the installation "because it reminds me of a church's interior where you’re constantly reminded that the spirit is good and the body is bad. This spirit goes up in space but the body remains on the ground. This piece is really about bringing those two differences together." Her first
feature film,
Pepperminta, had its world premiere at the
66th Venice International Film Festival in 2009. She summarized the plot as "a young woman and her friends on a quest to find the right color combinations and with these colors they can free other people from fear and make life better.” When interviewed by
The Guardian for a preview of her 2011 exhibition at London's Hayward gallery, Rist described her feminism: "Politically," she says, "I am a feminist, but personally, I am not. For me, the image of a woman in my art does not stand just for women: she stands for all humans. I hope a young guy can take just as much from my art as any woman." Rist has likened her videos to that of women's handbags, hoping that they'd have “room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex, and friendliness." ==Personal life==