Michelle Ross | Never an Even Folding
August 1 - 31, 2024
First Thursday opening: August 1, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Michelle Ross, Never an Even Folding, an exhibition of new, exuberant paintings which continue to refine her particular abstract language concerned with such notions as field and particle, dichotomous color schemes, and the treacherous poetry intrinsic to the project of abstract painting. Diptychs take center stage, extending her fascination with codependency, doubling, and the kind of imperfect symmetry reminiscent of a Rorschach card. This compositional device is used to graduate differences and create porous boundaries between competing or varied formal strategies. Within these paintings, Ross gives careful attention to edges, evidence of a real-time editing process akin to a photographer’s search for composition in a darkroom. But here, revealing the very deletions end up uniting, rather than dividing, fields of color, often sourced from a vast collection of paper scraps and color mixing notebooks.
Ross’s working methods are ultimately improvisational, but loose organizational strategies suggest cartography, geometry, and architecture as starting points. These compositional tools propel a hero’s journey bent on the exploration of Modernist painting tropes—techniques and the various worlds that live inside of painting. Thin washes of shimmering pigments are sprayed, stained, masked, and puddled across finely woven linen, canvas, and panel surfaces. Ghostly traces of graphite and the like occur not necessarily as a means of planning but a form of naked mark-making that lie semi-buried within stained swathes of ebullient color. Her work engages painting’s central ingredients such as touch, flatness, viscosity, etc. and celebrates the happy collision of planning and accident.
Michelle Ross examines the boundaries between painting, photography and popular media, creating new relationships, both conceptual and aesthetic, that mirror the shifting realities of our time. Her formal and abstract painting, as well as digital collages and textile work, have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (Boston, Massachusetts), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) and Rome International University (Rome, Italy). Her work resides in several collections, including the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Rhode Island School of Design Special Collections (Providence, RI) and the Four Seasons Hotel (Abu Dhabi, UAE), among others. In 2012, Ross was named as a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. Her commission in 2020 of four massive site-specific paintings each measuring 16 feet tall by seven feet wide for The Standard Insurance Company (Portland, OR) marks her largest-scale project to date.