Excerpt from IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
ALEXANDRA DODD
SA Art Times (June 2009)
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.
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©Alexandra Dodd 2009
Excerpt from IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
MICHAEL SMITH
ArtThrob (July 2009)
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.
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©Michael Smith 2009
