Going Strong for 7 Years: Andrew Scott Ross

Did you know the OPP blog just turned seven-years-old at the end of August 2018? In honor of our birthday and the artists we feature, we'll be sharing some blasts from the past throughout the year. In this post and throughout 2019, we'll share new work from Featured Artists interviewed in the first year of the blog. Today's artist is Andrew Scott Ross.

Ruins My Image (detail), 2018. Paper copies.

OPP: What's new in your practice, Andrew Scott Ross?

Andrew Scott Ross: I have dedicated the past seven years to the making of an encyclopedic museum—or more specifically a museum Omnia Temporaria—where all things, even the museum itself, is temporary. It’s an institution without a fixed location, and exists only as a collection of works; there are drawings, sculptures, videos, and installations. Many of these pieces mimic a diorama or traditional display of artifacts but are never considered complete. They transform each time they are presented and change in both form and intention.

Century Zoo IX, 2017. Weatherspoon Museum. Mud, paper, charcoal, paint, wood.

A good example is Century Zoo. This installation, produced when OPP first interviewed me in 2011, began with observational sketches within Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Roman Wing. I returned to the studio with all of these drawings, cut out parts, layered them, and covered them with ink, charcoal, and mud. Over the past seven years, I have exhibited this work eleven times, but have not once returned to the MET’s collection or observed their reproductions, denying myself the opportunity to reorient these representations to reflect the original forms.  

Century Zoo VII (installed at Gallery Protocol), 2016. Mud, Paper, Charcoal, Paint, Wood. Dimensions Variable.

Finally, the drawings of Attica pottery, Kouroi figurines, and marble busts are hardly recognizable, worn down by my studio process. The remaining forms and the way they are displayed in my installations only represent my fantasy of the originals. They are a collection of images corrupted by my imagination and the historical scholarship around this work that first influenced me. This evolving installation now represents my antiquities wing.

Dry Erase, 2017. Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Styrofoam, Dry Erase Paint, Dry Erase Markers.

In 2014, I started playing with sterile materials found at Office Depot, like rubber bands, sticky notes, and bulletin boards. I wanted to combine these familiar products with distant prehistoric motifs that are beyond the grasp of our traditional systems of visual analysis. These experiments eventually morphed into Dry Erase: a sculptural work made of artificial boulders encased in whiteboard paint. These objects are arranged in formations that resemble Paleolithic rock art sites and are continually affected by the drawings made on their surfaces. I make all additional drawings and erasures on-site in the gallery, so the act of making and unmaking the work relates directly to the exhibition environment.

Ruins My Image (Installation View at the Hunter Museum of American Art), 2018.

I started Ruins My Image last year, and its first variation is currently on display at the Hunter Museum of American Art. This is an expanding group of drawings that originated from a single reproduction of prehistoric San rock art from the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe. It all started from a small, beautiful, 3000-year-old yellow, ochre painting depicting an injured human. In my studio, it became the sole source of inspiration for the past last year. The results translated into an installation, which functions as a map of citations, a visual bibliography that charts where and why I have distorted the original prehistoric representation.

Songs (Abstract Cricket Boxes), 2014.

Like the Art Institute of Chicago, my fictive museum has a Modern Wing. The newest related work is sculptural and each piece doubles as a habitat for living animals. I created two Plexiglas geometric sculptures that act as aquariums for cold-water fish in 2012, and later, I made a series of sculptures that house crickets—you can hear them chirp as soon as you approach the objects.

Read our first interview with Andrew.