In this series of works entitled The Most Beautiful Western, Ross invokes the cowboy film –the beautiful Western of John Ford and John Wayne. Mirroring the spaces of Hollywood or the spaghetti western, not topographical delineated space but the limitless and artificial spaces that are created within the movies. Hollywood invented a specific and constructed America and the Western has been part of this construct since the beginning of the 20th century.
For Ross, the western is employed as a generic “peg” to access a more conceptual drift, which is laid out as a taxonomic exercise, referencing all the essential ingredients from the sublime to the clichéd. In the thirty piece drawing The Most Beautiful Western Ross lays out the chief protagonists and conventions of a post-modern cowboy film: here are the handsome young cowboys, the exotic stranger, hints of homo-eroticism (underscored by the presence of the hermaphrodite part female breasted cowboy), the 19th century pioneer women, half turned away to reveal her Ingres chignon, hinting at the familiar stereotypical opposites of the Western – faithful trail wife/Madonna meets bar girl/whore.
Ross’s paintings focus on the share croppers and small-holders waiting for the return of the Magnificent Seven or Shane; the gold rush trash; the Mexican bandits, and border men, the gambling table, the hanging tree, and the long- suffering mother of two sons; one the outlaw and one the good guy in a white hat. Also present is the infinite landscape, exotic prairie or painted valley, tepees and homesteads.
Ross has been a quiet pioneer of devices now familiar amongst a younger generation of artists. The conscious act of separation represented by his vitrines, the hesitant half glimpsed or half rendered images that invade one’s consciousness subtly as if from the corner of the eye and the cinematic implication that he is applying a wide angle lens. The deliberate avoidance of compositional or surface seduction, the introduction of palpable reality, for example collage elements -to challenge to much narrative meandering on the part of the viewer, the obvious homage to film genres. By a series of subtle calculations, Ross directs us to a parallel world where we can roam free. |
