Louise Martin-Chew finds her way with an exhibition at Brisbane SGAR gallery.

“Find your Way” is a series of maps, painstakingly pinned and layered, country over continent, colour over shape. However, connections are made organically – with aesthetic decisions about colour, shape and form extended with memory – not with geographical accuracy or veracity.

 

This first commercial exhibition from artist Rebecca Ross, better known for site specific installations, may be especially meaningful for Australians – plagued by our distance from the rest of the world.

Curator Louise Rollman suggested in 2010 that, “Ross has methodically accumulated a series of elastic genre-bending references that defy time and space, reflecting our experiences of this world.”

 

 

Yet there is a simplicity in the making of these works – shaped and coloured maps cut from the stacks of atlases, many collected from second hand book shops and dating from the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Ross says: “In a sense the works do form like natural geographic masses, it is an organic process.”

Gold Coasts for example began in homage to the Gold Coast (where Ross is currently living). Colour was tied to her geographic location and to other places in the world where the maps happened to colour-match.

Working with atlases from the past, seeing countries that no longer exist, exposes the artificiality of lines on a map and becomes part of the journey of discovery for artist and viewer.

 

The bringing together of places in reality and concept are long term interests for Ross – these works convey her ideas in works that are both intimate and engaging.

 

Spiro Grace Art Rooms SGAR
255 Gregory Tce Spring Hill QLD 4000 Australia
Telephone (07) 3839 8925 & 0404 005 413
11am-3pm Thursday to Saturday
sgar.com.au