Ross, a professor at OCAC, talks about staying on the sruface of painting, Vladimir Nabokov's novella "Transparent Things," and what's going on in art school.
Audio recorded 9/29/15 and edited by KBOO volunteer Sam Parrish.
From the press release:
September 3 - 26, 2015
Michelle Ross
Trust Falls & Transparent Things
Paintings
Ben Dallas
Serials
Dimensional Works
In September the Elizabeth Leach Gallery will proudly present, Trust Falls & Transparent Things by Michelle Ross and Serials by Ben Dallas. There will be a First Thursday reception on September 3, 2015 from 6 - 8 pm.
Through formal abstraction, Michelle Ross examines the boundaries between painting and popular culture, creating new relationships, both conceptual and aesthetic, that mirror the shifting realities of our time. Ross continues her search for ways that popular media can be altered or modified to create a greater understanding of space and form. In her 2013 exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Ross
examined the integration of digital photography with abstract painting. For Trust Falls and Transparent Things, she turns her focus to color, surface, and the abstract forms referenced in her earlier body of work.
In Trust Falls & Transparent Things, Ross demonstrates a looser, freer style in her painting. Working in multiple scales, the artist creates thinly layered paintings, using abstract modernist compositions as a method of transforming universal and familiar themes.
Ross received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR) and her MFA from Washington State University (Pullman, WA). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. In 2012, Ross was named as a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. Her work is held by a number of collections including the Rhode Island School of Design Special Collections (Providence, RI), Willamette University (Salem, OR) and the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR). In 2011 she was awarded in the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards exhibition at the Portland Art Museum.
Ben Dallas’ dimensional works strike a balance between painting and sculpture, finding harmony in precise geometric forms and painterly abstract surface. In Serials, his third solo exhibition at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, the artist presents work from several series of wall mounted constructions that share a common focus. Each series offers a likeness but not sameness, presenting a uniformity in the work while allowing for differences to emerge upon closer examination. In the series Twice, Dallas’ simple dualistic combinations consist of two painted panels, fitted together creating a structural component of equal importance to the layers of paint applied to the works surface.
Dallas’ dimensional paintings are developed and constructed mostly by intuitive sensibility with little planning or premeditation. By encouraging accidents and surprises in his process, he obtains a less predictable result from his initial intention.
Dallas received an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois in 1971. His work has been in exhibitions nationally including the Rockford Art Museum (Rockford, IL), Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago, IL) and the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum (San Francisco, CA). Dallas has shown with the Elizabeth Leach Gallery since 1996.
- KBOO