Red Off Centre by Rebecca Ross.
Rebecca Ross’s practice is concerned with site, situation and sensation. Often occurring in undisclosed locations, Ross uses readily available materials to map out natural spaces and architectural features. These interventions with manmade and natural environments create the artist’s own topography through a process that is not planned but rather performed on-site. The remnants of these performative interventions are large scale coloured geographies that map both interior and exterior space and the process of play.
These ongoing explorations of mapping spaces lead Ross to develop a body of work on a more intimate scale. Her recent body of work, 'Find Your Way', uses atlas maps as a ready-made material that is re-imagined in form and colour to create a new terrain. Ross’s contained exploration of colour and shape is built up through the existing maps texture and print quality that grows through the process of pinning and overlapping. These works begin to morph organically on the white background and become new land masses that are unrecognisable. The application is immediate and process driven, echoing her previous performative interventions of larger spaces. Find Your Way is a series of reconfigured objects that become representations of a new topography revisiting Ross’s interest in the juncture of site and situation.
BIO
Rebecca Ross was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1977, and now lives and works on the Gold Coast. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1998 and in 2003 was awarded the inaugural Brisbane City Council Lord Mayors' Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship which enabled her to undertake a research residency and a professional mentorship in Europe. Upon returning to Australia, Ross earned a Masters of Fine Art (2005) from Queensland University of Technology. Ross has participated in Artist in Residence programs in Malta, Italy, New Zealand and Australia, and has been awarded Career Development Grants from Arts Queensland on three occasions.
Recent solo exhibitions include 'Find Your Way', Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane, 2011; 'Radius of Action', Museum of Brisbane, 2010; 'There There', Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane, 2009. Her work is represented in public and private collections around Australia. In 2012 Ross will exhibit in 'Lie of the Land: New Australian Landscapes' at the Embassy of Australia, Washington DC, USA, curated by Alex Taylor (Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and take up the Rome Studio at the British School at Rome awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts.
