In Michelle Ross’s current exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Never an Even Folding, we find a painter so deeply knowledgeable about her materials, so fluent in her techniques, and so assured in her abstract vocabulary that she can challenge herself to new ways of making. 12 works of both single panels and diptychs of various dimensions utilize oil, acrylic, chalk, plaster and graphite to give the works a variety of textures and depth.
The viewer can chart the artist’s process – or at least guess at it – from thick impasto to thin washes, dribbles to turgid pools, large swaths of color to subtle mark-making. We are simultaneously in the studio at the artist’s side watching her work and in the gallery encountering these panels as landscapes, windows and spaces. Titles provide a roadmap for Ross’s inspirations and subject matter but these are allusive images that allow the viewer latitude to find their way through the work.
In historian and philosopher Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air, the author examines the triumphs and perils of Modernism and its challenging relationship to a rapidly changing world in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Continuing in this Modernist tradition of inquiry and boundary-pushing, Never an Even Folding is Ross’s response to our own present moment in which our understanding of the supposedly immutable laws of nature and physics are being upended and reconsidered.
Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (to whom Ross pointed me) has written: ”space is no longer different from matter. It is one of the “material” components of the world, akin to the electromagnetic field. It is a real entity that undulates, fluctuates, bends and contorts.” [1] In this show, Ross has taken on a destabilized aesthetic, material, and poetic response to this challenge. To paint a world that we can see but cannot know. And to manifest these ideas through material thinking. Just like Berman’s bewildered and bewildering Modernists, Ross has created work that allows us to test our discomfort with shifting paradigms.
The idea of contingency is key here. Ross has discussed her interest in unreliable structures and the reality that our world is not symmetrical, fixed, predictable. These paintings revel in that instability and disrupt what we think we know. In The frost took up the Search for your company, two small panels of very different sizes and surface treatments evoke a soft blue sky and a micro-view of something organic seemingly cultured out of ungessoed linen. What constitutes figure and ground, substrate and image are disrupted.
In Light-Eaters, two panels of different dimensions are paired but their palettes and paint application seem to speak in different dialects. Yet closer inspection reveals interesting formal contrasts and a new understanding of each. [2] Given the source of the title, it also alludes to unseen plant networks that require our careful consideration. In Day and Night and Night and Day, the firm division of the diptych is disrupted by incursions of paint from one panel to the other, much in the way our experience of time fades into itself. All of the diptychs question independence/dependence, the elimination or doubling of the center, and the (theoretical) possibility of being open or closed.
Ross’s conversation with Modernism does not present itself solely as a continuing cultural critique. Like her previous work, these paintings demonstrate her profound engagement with twentieth-century abstraction. Evident is Hans Hoffman’s push-pull, Mark Rothko’s immersive environments, Helen Frankenthaler’s landscapes of washes, Richard Diebenkorn’s reduction, palette, and structure, and Cy Twombly’s sgraffito. Two other Modernist works that came immediately to my mind were Henri Matisse’s foray to the brink of abstraction in paintings like Window at Collioure from 1914 and Arthur Dove’s abstract landscapes evoking sound like Foghorns from 1929. The painting as a window or a structure governs some of Ross’s works like Confluence and Husk. In others,Telegraphic and Highwire, in contrast we are already outside the structure and immersed..
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Titles lead us in a general direction toward themes. There are times of the day, Day and Night, Dusk and Dawn; reference to trees and plant systems, Mythos (tree); and references to movement in time and space, Confluence, Telegraphic. In conversation with the artist, I learned how deeply influenced she was by the changing light and colors of the sky outside her studio as well as investigations into quantum theory and plant intelligence. The subject matter operates on both a somatic and cerebral level. While the viewer may not have immediate access to Ross’s reading list, we can see the contingency of the forms, the shifting of planes and the consideration of space in its many manifestations.
The title of the show, Never an Even Folding, guides our inquiry. Folding implies manipulation of material, caring, covering, perhaps obscuring. There is the literal folding of the linen onto the panels, but also the metaphoric suggestion of the folding together of the diptychs. Like Rovelli’s notion of bending space, the imaginatively folded diptychs move the furthest points – the outer edges of the paintings – to immediate adjacency. This in turn leads to the metaphysical notions of time and space folding in upon each other. And because none of this folding is even, we circle around again to asymmetry and the imperfect structures (and perhaps beliefs) with which we live.
[1] Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books: 2018).
[2] The title is a reference to Zoe Shlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Harper: 2024).
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is located at 417 NW 9th Ave and open from 10:30 am – 5:30 pm Tuesdays through Saturdays. Never an Even Folding is on view through August 31st.
