1:1

2011 / david krut projects / johannesburg

ESSAY

SOMEWHERE I HAVE TRAVELLED, GLADLY BEYOND

 Alexandra Ross, Classic Feel Magazine (2011)

“The truth, of course, is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.” David Bowie

During a brief fallow period in Berlin in mid 2010, following a month-long residency on the island of Sylt, I embarked on a journey that took me deeper into my creative process and ultimately further into myself. As is so often the case when your voice is transposed into a foreign key, it sounds strange, dissonant even. At first, Berlin (undoubtedly one of the most interesting and vibrant hubs of the contemporary art world), quite overwhelmed me. Engulfed by the cacophony of visual stimuli, I retreated to the quiet cadence of my live-in studio and my self. From there I found it futile to work in the same way I had before and so, abandoning representation and figuration, I went back to the beginning - to abstraction and to the very essence of life; breath. I began by simply blowing marks, blots and stains onto fine German Hahnemühle paper using diluted oil paint and ink, the rhythm of my own breathing, and a plastic pipette.

 Surely the fundamental quality of any journey, including life, art and music, is movement, and change? Since my work had always been concerned with conveying the ephemeral, the transient and the mysterious nature of being, this new journey (or another part of the same one), was both the genesis and the culmination of these ideas. Blowing paint onto paper is a tricky business. I hovered in each moment, balanced precariously on a tightrope between accident and intent, beauty and ugliness. In a split second, a lovely, evocative stain could metastasize into a big, unlovely tumour, or an insignificant nothing would mysteriously bloom into something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something I quite liked...

This new, “Look ma, no hands!” process enabled me to let go of the need or desire to work on an image. It’s impossible to go back and fix an oil mark on a piece of paper. Either it’s right, or you labour the point and end up missing it entirely. Allowing pigment and paper to fuse with minimum physical effort or conscious intent is not unlike the way in which a Polaroid photograph emerges into visibility from a mute square of light-sensitive paper. For me, photography is essentially hands-free while painting is absolutely (and wonderfully) hands-on; since I’ve always been fascinated by and have explored both mediums, this new creative process became for me the perfect harmony of the two. I returned to Johannesburg in 2011, where my ‘discovery’ of the simultaneous yet ambiguous ease and difficulty of making marks on paper in a single, momentary gesture was the new challenge I brought to my oil on canvas paintings, the Polaroids. This ongoing series of paintings replicate the proportions of the iconic Polaroid photograph, its glossy picture area and matte white border, but are much larger. Apart from my interest in the window effect that this border creates, I find watching the image develop right before your eyes, quite magical. Like watching plants or clouds grow in fast motion. Of course, this developing process is taken from the traditional darkroom, only that with the Polaroid it happens almost instantaneously and apparently effortlessly.

 Instantaneous and effortless are not ideas typically synonymous with the notion of skill in the field of painting. We are taught to admire the artist who sweats all day in a garret, we reward people who work hard and effortfully. But for me, the truth is that making art, like living life, is a process and a journey. And I have found that it is possible to make the journey of a lifetime in a single, fleeting moment.

REVIEW

1:1

Alexander Opper, Art South Africa, Vol. 10. Issue 01 (2011)

There is something stereoscopic about Alexandra Ross’s most recent solo show, titled 1:1. A painstakingly choreographed double arrangement of near-identical works – comprising a compilation of constructed stains that symmetrically flank the exhibition space – results in a spatial construct which embodies a simultaneous breaking open and doubling of the gallery space. With dual economy and excess, the artist has skilfully filled the gallery with two complementary sets of work that, through their mirrored mutual dependence, oscillate between severance and union.

In stereoscopy, a slightly different image is relayed to each eye in order to trick the mind into making a whole from the two separate parts. In 1:1, the doubled images making up the show are ostensibly the same: the pairs of stains convey the illusion of being identical but are, upon closer investigation, only almost identical approximations of each other. Apart from its reliance on simultaneous doubling and splitting in order to achieve the illusion of wholeness – an attempt at a form of visual truth – the device of the old-world stereoscopic camera also serves as a useful link to talk about Ross’s exploitation of photography as both vehicle and medium in her broader practice. Ross started her artistic career as a painter. She has since expanded her practice to include photography, drawing and hybrid forms of process- and material-driven media expressions. Although the work on the 1:1 show consisted of one long wall of constructed stains (oil-on-paper works, monotypes and prints) – physically mirrored by another set of analogous fabricated stains on the gallery’s opposite wall – the reproductive, twin nature of the so-called originals and their perceived duplicates, speaks very strongly of a hand-made, “photographic” mode of reproduction. In my view, the artist here extends Walter Benjamin’s famous references to photography in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), and that discipline’s pivotal role in blurring and problemetising both the notion and value of the aura attached to the original (to which a given photograph of that original refers). In Ross’s work, copied original and original copy enter into a dialogue that cannot be disentangled into a comfortable binary.

The quietness of these meticulously constructed stains, particularly the oil-on-paper pieces, is deceptive. The works embody invisible artistic process-like performances, namely of the artist blowing oil paint across the variously coloured paper surfaces. These enactments express themselves as a series of stains which, together with their carefully constructed twins, make up the two halves of the show. This method of production – in terms of the translation of the artist’s breath into the formed formlessness of the stains – represents an interesting extension to the minimalist tradition, a mode in which much of the work depends, in the final formal execution of its driving idea, on the literal absence of the artist’s hand.

In the lineage of Ross’s artistic production 1:1 demonstrates a reflection on and development of her 2007 show, Viewpoint – which used photography directly as means and end – in the sense that it expands on her radically subtle experiments in challenging and blurring the bounds of the white cube’s superficially strict spatial envelope. In 1:1 the mirror line which divides and joins the two halves of the show is literally inscribed into the gallery using a line of thin luminescent yellow tape. This implied mirror allows the viewer to constantly navigate, both physically and mentally, from one half of the gallery into the other, and vice versa. The ambivalent line becomes the key to the exhibition. In what could be read as a borrowing from Foucault’s employment of the reflecting surface and spatial depth of the mirror, in his consideration of heterotopias, Ross’s line at once disrupts and unites the gallery space; it spatially and temporally undermines the geography of the more traditional relationship between viewer and artwork.

The manner in which the show mimics itself lends it a simultaneous state of exacerbated visibility and an uncanny invisibility – a kind of cancelling-out of itself. Once Ross’s stains are removed from the idealised space of the gallery, in pairs, like mimicking animals disembarking from an artistic ark they will, in turn, undermine their new physical and symbolic contexts: via an ongoing mode of splitting and joining, and a thickening and disruption of the fragile surface of the everyday.

The inherent alternating state of this particular body of work’s potential to solidify and blur alludes not only to the notion of the visual. The rhythmic quality of this to and fro condition speaks to the sonic affiliations of the word “stereo” used in the introduction: in this case specifically to the echo. In the same way in which the “silence” embodied in John Cage’s 4’33’’ (1952) is anything but empty, so Ross has successfully managed to reinterpret and fill the white vessel of her site of intervention, with a reverberating silence of understated yet rich “sound”.

Alexander Opper is an architect, artist and designer, and a Senior Lecturer in the University of Johannesburg’s Department of Architecture

Opper, A. 2011. Alexandra Ross. David Krut Projects, Johannesburg. In Art South Africa. Vol. 10. Issue 01. Spring: 75-76.

INTERVIEW

1:1

Juliet White interviews Alexandra Ross (May 2011)

Alexandra Ross’ last exhibition at David Krut Projects was In Search of Lost Time in 2009.

Juliet White: The works created for this exhibition are completely abstract and for people who haven’t seen your work since 2009, this is completely different. What is the link between the Polaroid drawings and paintings, from your previous show here, and these ink and oil ‘stain’ works?

Alexandra Ross: This series came out of my interest in photography. I’ve always had these parallel interests in painting and photography and the Polaroid’s from the 2009 show were really me trying to condense these two interests into one form. The Polaroid is quite magical and has movement within a static medium, which is interesting and quite a contradiction. That is what I wanted to capture in my painting.  

JW: How did your residency on Sylt and your stay in Berlin last year affect the work you are now doing?

AR: In Berlin I found that I just couldn’t paint in the same way that I had been painting for the past year and a half. It was partly being overwhelmed by all the contemporary art that other artists were doing so I was almost and oversaturated with other people’s ideas. I needed to retreat into myself in order to find out if there was anything that I could say that was different from everything that I was seeing around me that somehow reflected something truer about me and not necessarily about the outside world. I was trying to do figurative sketches with oil paint and I wasn’t enjoying any of them and, as these things happen, I made a mistake and in that accidental mark I found something perfect.

I showed at the 7th Berliner Kunstsalon which was an independent art fair that ran concurrently with the official Berlin Art Fair, Artforum. At the time I wanted to construct two walls reflecting each other and the idea came out of the work process itself: I was working on thin sheets of paper with a lot of turpentine which soaked through to the pages below creating multiple copies.

 JW: What was your experience like being back at DKW in the print workshop?

AR: It was completely different because the works that I made in Berlin were made on my own in isolation and no one could see what I was doing and no one was looking until I showed the work. in Berlin. It was really all about my self. It was a really direct one-to-one relationship with between me and my work. But I also enjoyed the one to-one nature of the monotypes, of making an imprint directly off the original.

 JW: How did the title for this show come about?

AR: Being in a foreign country you feel split - half of me was back home in Johannesburg and half of me was a new person discovering new things about myself, interacting in a different way, not understanding the language, also feeling slightly disconnected. I originally wanted to call the show in Berlin Ditto Dito, which was about making copies of the work and a ‘German’ copy of myself. I decided on 1:1 for many reasons but also because I liked the visual effect of the numbers mirroring each other. It’s perfectly symmetrical. I also like the reference to architecture - the ratio of scaled models. The two sides of the gallery are also identically replicated. 1:1 is an intimate conversation that originated from me confronting facing and looking at myself. Of course, it also relates to the Rorschach test; the marks used to identify or interpret one’s psyche or to make certain discoveries about your subconscious based on those interpretations. The entire exhibition is like a giant Rorschach test which is a mirror to the unconscious, to the self. Your interpretation of the work probably tells you more about yourself than it does about me.

 JW: A large part of your artwork is focused on mirroring the gallery space. Is the space integral to the meaning of your work?

AR: That was a strong impulse for me to do something with the gallery itself. To exhibit in a gallery, for me is amazing because it gives me this great white soap box to stand on and say what I want for an entire month. It’s a position of power. I think it’s good to play with that and not to take it too seriously. Millions of contemporary artists are playing with gallery spaces; it almost becomes a medium in itself. It’s great to create an environment to allow people to think in and to experience themselves in different ways in.

 JW: You are largely influenced by modernist ideas around the deliberate accident, nothingness in art and the gallery as the hallowed white cube.

AR: The gallery is a kind of void, it is an empty space that can be filled with anything and with this installation there is nothingness in this exhibition because I am setting it as if it were one space being mirrored. If you as a viewer stand in a hall of mirrors you see yourself mirrored infinitely. In the gallery there are no actual mirrors, so the viewer isn’t actually reflected and in a sense doesn’t exist in this space. The idea is for the viewer to engage with the individual works and then perhaps find themselves reflected in the works through their interpretation of them. In the title there are two equal entities or quantities on either side of a dividing line, although it’s a perforated line, it’s a permeable membrane so one that things can pass through. There’s dialogue between the one side of the self and the other, between the conscious and the subconscious. I also think particularly in the era that we are living now there’s a very interesting relationship between the original and the copy especially in the art world, because so much of what artists do in a postmodern context is copying and reworking, there’s very little in art of the original left.

 JW: In conclusion, what are you saying with your work?

AR: It’s a very philosophical investigation of reality. I’m not making statements or answering questions, I’m just encouraging a different perspective on reality. I’m encouraging myself and the viewers to experience this different perspective on reality. A sense of the ephemeral runs through most of my work, it’s something I’ve always been interested in, this momentary, transient experience called life. The work itself is ephemeral; it can be made and destroyed in an instant.