Rist's work is known for its multi-sensory qualities, with overlapping projected imagery that is highly saturated with color, paired with sound components that are part of a larger environment with spaces for viewers to rest or lounge.

Rist's work often transforms the architecture or environment of a white cube gallery into a more tactile, auditory and visual experience.

[10] Her works generally last only a few minutes, borrowing from mass-media formats such as MTV and advertising,[13] with alterations in their colors, speed, and sound.

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.

[19] Sip my Ocean (1996)[20] is an audio-video installation projected as a mirrored reflection on two adjoining walls, duplicating the video as sort of Rorschach inkblots.

The video is intercut with dreamlike frames of bodies swimming underwater and other melancholic images such as colourful overlays of roses across the heavens.

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.

[10][21] Ever Is Over All (1997)[22] 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.

Rist's nine video segments titled Open My Glade[24] 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.

"[31] 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.

[51] Ever Is Over All was referenced in 2016 by Beyoncé in the film accompanying her album Lemonade in which the singer is seen walking down a city street smashing windows of parked cars with a baseball bat.