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 chamber 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 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.
