Excerpt from VIEWPOINT
MARY CORRIGALL
Art South Africa (August 2007)
Instead of employing the gallery environment as a blank canvas onto which she projects her expression, Ross reflects sizeable, life-like fragments of the Everard Read Gallery. This not only causes a spatial or visual disruption for viewers but also ultimately leaves them ruminating on the nature of art and the politics of presentation.
The relationship between art and the setting in which it is presented is fraught with issues that can destabilize the shaky foundations defining the art object. Since Marcel Duchamp first exhibited everyday objects in a gallery space it became obvious that the art gallery setting plays a significant role in redefining or shifting perceived meanings associated with objects. Ross also reinvests meaning in the everyday, presenting seemingly insignificant shots of a vacant, stark white room. These photographs, however, subvert the traditional role assigned to art and the gallery. Here the gallery features as the art object. And while the titles of the artworks - View 1, View 2 and so on - confirm the photographs function as objective purveyors of space, the details and vistas that are captured reveal the artist’s point of view at work.[…] Ross exploits this intimate relationship as she attempts to bridge the perceived gulf between art and the settings that give it greater import. Here the art and gallery are part of a cohesive visual that play off each other and interact. Ross’ approach to bringing these concepts to the surface is ingenious and certainly worthy of the Brait-Everard Read Art Award 2007, which this exhibition has secured for her.
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©Mary Corrigall 2007
Excerpt from THIS IS NOT A WINDOW
DAVID BUNN
Viewpoint Exhibition Catalogue (July 2007)
Unusually for new generation South African art, [Viewpoint’s] subject is very philosophical, having to do with time and the nature of being, with what philosophers call “ontology”. To achieve that end, she has had to clear the gallery, so that it seems like a stripped down, generic, post-modern display environment without metaphor, without poetry and with an almost inhuman stillness. Standing in this clean space, however, you will quickly become aware of the artworks themselves. Each is a framed and displayed view, in exactly the same dimensions as the aluminium framed glass doors that lead out of the gallery, representing some aspect of the perceptual experience of the space which is not ours and which is in a past that is not ours. The room gives aspects of our glance back to us, from a time that is not the present.
In this beautifully dissembling work by Alexandra Ross, there are four planes of visible experience: there is the domain of the imagined real world, which the Viewpoint installation seems to obliterate; there is the ontology of the original object, photographed in an earlier time; there is the reflective and mediating glass surface through which the camera looked in time past; and finally, there is the rich epistemology of the present, with the viewer becoming conscious of the weight of her body in a sparse room, the whisper of visitors, and the materiality of the reflective presences in the plexiglass of the works now directly before you.
Between these subtle and lasting impressions there is only the experience of time.
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©David Bunn 2007
