ROSS MUIRHEAD

Photography, Installation Art

City: Roberts Creek, British Columbia

Website: http://www.rossmuirhead.work/

Artist Statement: Series Title: KEEPERS

I define this work as photo-installation since each picture is displayed against an extended frame painted directly on the gallery wall. Each frame is 14” wide, large enough to lead the viewer’s eye to each image reducing the peripheral vision from the gallery’s neutral white space and to anchor or attach the picture to the gallery space. Black was chosen, as its lack of color pulls the image into a space beyond the bounds of institutional space into the realm of the void where new meaning is free to resonate.

For me an art work consists of the form, content, implicit and explicit meanings generated by the viewer. These parts make up the “ecosystem” of the work. The title functions to tie together these parts into a whole.

I take hundreds of pictures each year on various excursions and the ones presented in this series are my ‘keepers’. The word suggests that these pictures have portray an important scene and by extension hold within them a truth or a piece of knowledge. My objective is to hold the viewer’s attention long enough to allow a perceptual and cognitive process to be started and then the question may emerge: “What is really going on here in this image before me?” This springs to mind the inquiry process.

In one of the pieces, ‘Stripped Bare’, a sawmill’s machinery has been ‘stripped’ out of the factory leaving behind a ‘bare’ context, or a lack of function and lack of work. The title describes both a process evident in the picture and also social-economic implications. In the reference to M. Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) or ‘Large Glass’ the dialogue is continued around the idea of fulfillment being ‘stripped bare’ by mechanical process. Regionally, it points to neo-liberal policies that has affected B.C.’s timber industry in the early 2000s leading to a decline of sawmills and jobs.

For me, an effective title works like a pendulum, swinging between the title and the image. It leads to the uncertainty of meaning which supports inquiry.

This framing device is intended to “"ground” the viewer’s experience to the site of the architecture. Black space revokes several references: the void, the interior of the camera (before it opens) and the blackness of the cave as a metaphor for the unconscious. The viewing experience is phenomenological, in that from the nothingness of black emerges a full color image.

The black frame as an installation device, refers to Kazimir Malevich’s 'Black Square', 1915 - the first non-representational painting. In his statement: “Black Square is meant to evoke the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing.” inspired me to explore some of these notions. By inserting my photographs into a similar ‘black square’ the intention is to create a viewing space where feeling can be linked with meaning. A feeling of the image is triggered by a sense of its place in the void and then title evokes an intellectual free reasoning.

My content leans towards environmental-social issues stemming from personal interests and its critique. My use of photography and its presentation is an extension of this exploration.

Biography: Born in Vancouver, studied at Emily Carr College of Art and University of BC (MFA). Exhibited internationally (Barbican Art Gallery, London UK), nationally (Edmonton Art Gallery) and regionally (Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver).