JOSHUA ROSS
These photographs were developed through a series of processes and actualized with key individuals. The images presented here began as drawings, in a certain sense they are magnifications of drawings. Originally, the drawings are made rapidly; each one is made in an effort to create the most difficult imagining of a sculptural form relating to the limbs of a body.
This selection of digital photographs present a record that layers a private and public performance with people willing to explore the boundaries of a garment that I made. These objects were activated on different occasions. Three separate performances took place in agreed, lived and/or discovered, conversely locations. Interestingly, each of the collaborators have given identities, like we all do, but have formulated a self that is based on ideas that they have formed and/or that inform how they navigate their person’s in the world. Their agreement to make these works especially supports and extends the potential meaning of these forms, that together, reflect, question and explore ideas of a stable self, a stable ground, and the shifting and expansive potentialities of being in the world.
I have developed a practice that integrates drawing, performance, and photography. Woven together, these modes of production are the vehicle through which I question ideas of a unified self and manage terms of the body. In certain ways I am interested in representing interiority, shifting desire and the complex, ongoing interrelationships within identity itself. The integration of artistic medium within my practice creates a complex negotiation of ‘real’ space, where the limits of representation are blurred. Exploring pre-symbolic and active languages of sound and dance, I think analogically about the body. This culminates in an exploration of the limits of institutional, bodily, and spatial structures; it is an effort to grapple with absence within presence and illuminate the constancy of flux.
Most recently my practice has explored the grammar of clothing through a series of deconstructing, mixing, collaging, and assembling of fabric. The assembly of these garments relocates the functioning limb, destabilizing an ordered image by confusing body parts for functioning structures, and functioning structures for body parts. Is a sleeve for your arm? Is a sleeve for your leg? Is it a pant leg for your neck? With abrupt shifts, the garments find flexibility in moments of rupture. The garment structure heightens the idea of choreography—being worn they double the body, and in performance they double again to underscore the question of agency. Does the body perform, or is the body being performed? Simultaneously, the garments I make become form and un-form.
Joshua Ross
Joshua Ross (1992, Indianapolis, Indiana) holds an MFA in Art at the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. Ross’ research-based practice is informed by gender studies, critical race theory, and poetry, intent on investigating institutional, bodily, and spatial structures that organize and influence perception. Ross’ multi-disciplinary practice employs and appropriates a variety of material and media developed through relationships to methodologies inherently related to his research and archival experiences of photography.
