IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

2009 / DAVID KRUT PROJECTS / JOHANNESBURG

REVIEW

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

Alexandra Dodd, SA Art Times (2009)

In retreat from the bright red injunction to ‘Kill and Go’ that is currently hanging in the window of the Goodman Gallery on Jan Smuts Avenue and freaking the bejesus out of me every time I drive past it, I decided to follow a gentler, more generative impulse, and headed to David Krut Projects for a solo by Alexandra Ross. The series of nude photographs printed on aluminium that Ross produced for In Camera – last year’s two-hander with her brother, David Ross, at Resolution Gallery – were darkly erotic and conceptually concise all at once.

 Shortly after completing a four-month residency at the Nirox Foundation in 2008 and receiving her Masters in Fine Arts from Wits University, Ross was invited to collaborate with the printmakers at David Krut Print Workshop and this current solo is the result of that studio experience.

Not only was I drawn to the title of the show, In Search of Lost Time, but also to the attendant quote by contemporary philosopher, Alain de Botton: ‘Journeys are the midwives of thought.’

Last year at this time I was about to embark on a journey to Paris to attend a literary conference at which De Botton was one of the speakers. The author of thoughtful treatises like How Proust Can Change Your Life and Essays in Love, De Botton’s wit and erudition is like saffron in a world of Wimpy. Far from the dark currency of the smash-and-grab, kill-and-go mentality, his writing is an injunction to contemplate, to think differently about things and, in so doing, expand and multiply the possibilities of perception and experience available to us as conscious, sensate beings.

So this winter, I was about to hijack my own frazzled consciousness and depart for the hills of Ixopo to spend some time thinking and walking amidst the greenness and clearness that has been cultivated at the Buddhist Retreat Centre there. But before I left town, I managed to slip into gallery for a sneak preview of Ross’s work. Having packed my own suitcase, I was delighted to discover that the show was all about journeys and the mysterious way in which train journeys, in particular, start out in the physical realm, but as we surrender to the reality of movement, soon become metaphysical.

‘While the journey as metaphor evokes collective, generic memory, it is also my personal journey, regaining “lost” time – a journey through photography back to painting and drawing,’ says Ross, who hadn’t put pencil to paper for 15 years before embarking on this tinglingly ephemeral series of drawings and editioned prints.

 In Search of Lost Time features a long line of immaculately and identically framed drawings, paintings, mezzotints and monotypes that run, like a train track, along one wall of the gallery, each image precisely contained within a format that recalls the memento-like quality of a Polaroid photograph. Walking along this ‘track’ from image to image echoes the experience of gazing out of a train window at the changing view. The finely rendered prints track the artist’s recollection of a recent train journey from Cape Town to Johannesburg , but just as the journey becomes more metaphysical, the images start to rise up from the dark bed of memory as much as from the landscape itself.

The frames hold mental snapshots of characters walking along station platforms, an abandoned swing in a park, a reservoir, a man pushing a trolley, etiolated winter trees, fleeting aspects of small town and rural life along the trans-Karoo train route, but there is also an image of birds taking flight that stems from a memory of Ross’s time in London and another of figures in a park that turns out to be Emmarentia. I find myself particularly drawn to the subtle tonalities and immaculate twiggy lines of an image of a naked leafless tree, and warm to the discovery that the image is from the memory of a tree at the Buddhist Retreat in Ixopo, where, in 24 hours, I will be. Loops within loops of mysterious sense – these strange circuits of commonality seem to offer up an alternative logic of their own. And this journey hasn’t even begun yet.

REVIEW

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

Michael Smith, Artthrob (July 2009)

Alexandra Ross’s recent body of work, on show at David Krut Projects under the title In Search of Lost Time (named for Marcel Proust’s epic and influential novel), marked a return to painting, drawing and the autographic mark for this artist whose last two Johannesburg shows comprised photographic work. But a large chunk of the work produced for this show never made it to the gallery walls. Stricken by last-minute technical problems, Ross did what any normal, hardworking artist would do: she worked even harder and quicker…

I visited Ross in her studio about a month before the opening of this show. There I saw an extensive series of drawings and monotypes, to which she would add even more before the show opened in July. Finely-wrought images, these operated like film stills, not necessarily consecutive but certainly suggestive of a narrative, albeit a tantalizingly fragmented one.

Yet it was Ross’s paintings that I found particularly compelling: layered washes of muted tones accrued on their surfaces to create slow burning yet deeply moving images.

So I was surprised to arrive at the exhibition to find that none of the paintings I had seen were on show: instead they were replaced by similarly-scaled monochromatic works, hybrids of pencil and charcoal, their dimensions and white borders mimicking Polaroid photographs.

It turns out that an eleventh hour attempt to re-stretch the colour works to Polaroid proportions undermined their integrity. Ross had to generate 8 new paintings to replace them. Under this kind of pressure, she hastily discovered a way of working with charcoal, graphite pencil, paint and liquin that suited her visual concerns, and opening night came and went without a hitch.

Yet crucially, this forced shift also buttressed her conceptual project: the images on show are worked from sets of photographs taken from a moving train; with this body of work Ross sought to explore travel, displacement and speed. Her quickly-developed language of marks, striations and brush sweeps all contribute to sensations of movement, of barely tangible snippets momentarily grasped and then lost during a journey.

To describe Ross’s recent return to painting and drawing as a departure from previous bodies of work is to tell only half the truth. On the surface these images appear different from last year’s In Camera exhibited at Resolution Gallery, and Viewpoint, her 2007 Brait-Everard Read award-winning show, in that both of these comprised primarily photographs. The hand-rendered surfaces of ‘In Search of Lost Time’, variously streaked, hatched or built up in layers seem, by contrast, worlds away from the photograph’s cool, aloof skin.

Yet a closer look reveals that they are significantly derived from the camera. Beyond simple appropriation, their rendered, constructed passages are meditations on rather than quotations of the photograph’s visual shorthand. Photography, even the Polaroid image that has so preoccupied Ross for years, is always about the reduction of the visible world down to units, whether it be shades of grey, reduced colouration, pixels or lines.

The fleeting detail of Polaroid: Escalator and its soul mate on this show, Polaroid: Platform alludes to Impressionist-era interests in the body dissolved by self-conscious mark-making; and one detects simultaneous interest in the philosophical implications of passing, and in fact speeding, through places where others walk, as if the notion of the Baudelaire’s flâneur were taken to extremes by the speed of modernity.

This is more than a little autobiographical, albeit obliquely so: Ross was in the stage of moving from Cape Town to Johannesburg just before making these works, and many of the images on the show derive from photos taken on a long train journey between the cities. Later, she described her status to me as generally quite peripatetic. The tension in these images between fixity and motion, and movement’s attendant upheaval, both serve to locate the show very much in within Proust’s lineage.

Throughout, the camera itself is a recurrent theme. This is underscored by Polaroid: Interior and Polaroid: Witness, where the darkened interior of the carriage compartment echoes the chambre noir of a camera, into which the outside world’s light and experience flood.

Among the emotional weight of these works there are others, which deal in a more difficult and arguably more sophisticated visual language. Polaroid: Embankment images an anonymous moment of urban architecture; its tension derives from the way it operates as a perfect foil for Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’. While many works on this show are allusive and generative, allowing space for emotions of loss and lack to be projected onto and into the scenes, this image challenges in that it allows little room for immediate emotional connection. As such it becomes expressive of those moments in a journey when the landscape confounds and resists understanding.

Another such work is Polaroid: Glare, a bleached-out monotype of light flooding through the compartment window. Almost like a Robert Ryman painting in its economy, the work trades the purely representational for something far closer to abstraction, as if the challenge of Polaroid: Embankment were translated through into the very surface of the work.

Ultimately, In Search of Lost Time, appropriately sprawling given its literary impetus, revealed few if any dead spots for its length. Ross succeeded in creating a show that managed the juggling act of fully exploring an idea and sustaining viewer interest.

ESSAY

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

Alexandra Ross

“Journey’s are the midwives of thought.” Alain de Botton

In Search of Lost Time is a journey. It begins on a train… and ends in a train of thought. It unfolds as the story of an actual train journey - the lived embodied experience of going from one physical place to another - but it also traverses the intangible landscapes of memory and mind. The fleeting glimpses of the world outside the shadowy train interior, briefly framed in the window, may be either real or imaginary. Likewise, the works themselves, paintings and drawings made from photographs and finally presented as imitation Polaroids, hover in the indeterminate gap between reality and illusion, fact and fiction. As the train journeys onward, passing real people and places, the consciousness of the traveler recalls and invents other, more ephemeral ones. And while the Journey as metaphor evokes collective, generic memory, this is also a personal journey, regaining ‘lost time’ (if such a thing were possible). This is my own journey, through photography, back to painting and drawing.