Michelle Ross – I Am Your Signal – Viewing Room
Michelle Ross
Twelve Twenty-One Twenty Twenty, 2021
acrylic, Flashe, oil, graphite and pastel on panel
65.25 x 83"
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Michelle Ross
Bathyscaphe (for CM), 2021
acrylic, oil, paper, silver leaf,
graphite and pastel on panel
24 x 30"
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Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Michelle Ross, I Am Your Signal, an exhibition of new boldly-colored abstract paintings. Ross’s paintings satisfyingly challenge the static experience of viewing through her enlivened, lush palette and dynamic formal considerations.
In Ross’s words, her studio practice seeks to “activate curiosity and tolerance through materiality, form, color and sign” and these new works are inspired by academic research and art historical writings on abstract painting. The works highlight the artist’s interest in spatial tension and disruptions of linear perspective through layered surfaces that hold the rigorous building, dismantling and reconstruction of diagonal lines and geometric shapes.
Michelle Ross
Like A Mountain (two fists of solid rock CM), 2021
acrylic, Flashe, oil, graphite and pastel on panel
65.25 x 83"
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Michelle Ross
Tangent, 2021
acrylic, oil, paper, silver leaf, graphite, pastel and colored pencil on panel
24 x 30"
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Deeply saturated blues, ranging from indigo to ultramarine to cobalt, complement icy whites, warm yellows and brilliant pinks. Ross’s addition of reflective silver leaf accents glimmer, disappear or darken through the viewer’s movement. Edges and outlines of painted shapes evoke origami-like paper creases, further emphasizing spatial considerations that allow the artwork to unfold before the viewer’s eyes.
Read Michelle Ross's Artist Statement >
Michelle Ross
Bloom, 2020
oil and mixed media on panel
65.25 x 83"
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“Ross’s paintings and sculptures–their folds, fabric, shapes, bends, lines–do feel like bodies, on the floor, on the wall, but they don’t look like bodies. No head, no arms, no face, no torso. Abstraction offers a way out of the impasses of representation.”
Michelle Ross
Sensor, 2021
acrylic, oil, paper, silver leaf, graphite, pastel and colored pencil on panel
24 x 30"
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“Required” Reading: Text and Reference Material from the Studio
“I am interested in destabilizing the notion of a painting as a static experience.”
David J. Getsy, "Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction," in Jared Ledesma, ed., Queer Abstraction, exh. cat. (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2019), pg. 67.
Link to Essay >
Ross’s academic research ranges from historical and contemporary painters to David Getsy's multiple writings on Queer Abstraction Theory. A few additional examples of influential texts below:
About the Artist
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, 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 recent commission, four massive site-specific paintings measuring 16 feet tall by 7 feet wide at The Standard Insurance Company (Portland, OR) in 2020 marks her largest-scale project to date.
