Ross by contrast is unambiguously white and, like John Coplan, his photographs are dependent, for some of their paradoxical ‘rub’, on his less than olympian, senior, physique. Haring’s bodily subjects were often beautiful, and often black … such as the then-young 80s Diva Grace Jones’, and the physically-prime Choreographer Bill T Jones. Keith Haring’s practice sits well with Ross’ project – given Haring’s serial habit of mapping painted vermiculation onto the topography of naked human skin. Additional enchantment comes via the anatomically neat fit of the skull’s forehead and crown’s into the artist’s broad upper back and shoulders. The skull’s eye-hole concavities – courtesy of Claesz’s 17th century memento mori – suggests an uncannily eyeless view into Ross’ pictorially excavated interior. A lustrous human skull atop a low plinth of piled diaries, with the feathered end of a quill pen, anchors the painting’s projected, De Trop, detail. Particularly arresting is one image featuring a 17th century Pieter Claesz painting. Ross continues the tradition, but cloaks the entrance to his own implied ‘grotto’ of self with a fleeting veneer of transformative art-world-images that Ross selects for their inherent power to delight, intrigue, and contend. And much like John Coplans’ candid, nude, self-portraits, Ross’ frankly employed, late-in-life, body provides a very real corporeal canvas upon which perishable experience is indelibly scribed.įrom van Rijn to Van Gogh to Van Hout artists have long employed self portraiture to suggest to the viewer that they are being granted privileged access to an artist’s catacomb of self. Like Tā moko which traditionally traces whakapapa … and western tattoos – which often attempt memorialisation of personal history – Ross’ self-affiliated and projected art-lineage may be viewed as a photographically taxidermic record of his own temporarily-illuminated skin. Like the optically fluctuating body of the octopus – as it moves across territories of relative refuge or peril – an artist’s body of work modifies in response to a lifetime’s traverse across creative peaks and productively barren vales.ĭoc Ross’ exquisite A P hantasmic Exposure of Self Through Art presents us with an ambitious series of unique, large-format, photographs which are synchronously skin deep and implicitly rich. The look of an artists’ work shifts in response to their perceived place in historical making and momentarily manifest desire. ![]() Our creatives selves are composites of the curated past and our own aspirational present. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible….” “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. A Phantasmic Exposure of Self Through Art
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