Moral Fiber

2010 - 2012

Ross blurs lines and points out correlations between contemporary news with biblical stories, and Greek/Roman mythology in her series entitled "Moral Fiber." Traditional nude poses, appropriated from internet sources, paired with dark, custom wooden frames are a nod to motifs found in places of worship and period styles.

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Blanket Series

2005

My interest is in personifying two conflicting roles: the innate need to be a nurturer and the longing to be an object of sexual desire. The work asks whether these two seemingly dichotomous pursuits can harmoniously exist by highlighting the repellent tension they manifest.

I explore this duality through the production of large sewn quilts that appropriate explicit images of women from the Internet.  Imagery portraying bondage scenes are significant because of Bondage and Discipline’s (B&D’s) relationship with performance and control—giving up control and or gaining control. Sewing these images into the fabric itself implies the duality of womanhood in question. Embroidered figures of sewing machines and other instructional materials further bind these women to a domestic article that ‘blankets the taboo.’

Moreover, I am interested in the evolution of the female pin-up and what it is about the 1950s pin-up aesthetic that lends itself to continuous imitation. Perhaps I am attracted to the 1950s aesthetic because of the situational control emanated by the female participants, or maybe the attraction lies in the overall grandiose illusion of enjoyment. I am confident that even though they may speak to the sexes on different levels, images of the “cheesecake” genre entice the viewer to fantasize about their own personal involvement—men and women alike.

Pin-up imagery personifies fantasy—the fantasy of what we want to have and what we want to be. As Laura Mulvey points out, “There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at.” 

It is through the production of these quilts that I am determined to gain a better understanding of my own dissonant attitudes towards pornography, fetishism and feminism as well as create my own ideology of what it means to be a modern woman.

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Motherboard Series

2010 - 2014

Sacred_Profane Exhibition 2008 Statement: Referencing the title of Titian's 16th century painting Sacred and Profane Love, Ross investigates the wide range of media to provide a contemporary reinterpretation of proper and obscene, respectable and shameful. The work, in this contemporary context, mingles teasing innocence with erotic voracity, challenges the irony of representation of the female form with standard moral differences between sanctified love and fantastical desire. The series of Samplers and Motherboards, Love Swing sculpture and Rockwell’s a Surrealist mixed media installation originate from images from the internet, religious texts and domestic objects – all loaded with pornographic innuendos – which Ross works and reworks using handicraft techniques, transforming them while retaining a sense of their original meaning and physical form. An interesting tension arises when pornography is integrated with handicraft, blurring distinctions between the sacred and the profane for it pokes fun at the very idea of leeway or discrepancy, and inevitably engages the viewer’s critical eye.

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Ishihara Test Series

2004 - 2006

We all are born colorblind. It is not until the fourth month of life when the cones in our eyes develop enough that we can differentiate color. While females carry the colorblind gene, 5-8% of men are colorblind whereas only 0.5% of women are affected. Hue is confused by color-deficient people. Hence, if the hues that make up an image are the same value and saturation, there is no visual clue to distinguish them – this principle is the primary concept of the familiar Ishihara Colorblind Tests.

My latest artwork plays on the tension of having fetishistic images of the male gaze filtered through an ocular disability predominantly specific to males. By appropriating images of pornography icon Jenna Jameson and placing her image within the Ishihara Test, her image becomes less about the immediacy to sexual satisfaction and more about the biology of the gaze itself. This connection between desire and the biology behind it is the locus of this project.

The still images are printed large (54 x 80 inches) on commercial vinyl to echo the commodified polish of the original content, as well as refer to a pop/op aesthetic that places the work within a more art historical context. The remediation of original screen-based content from internet sources is brought back to the printed surface, addressing the odd relationship between public and private viewership.

Along with the still images is a newer video piece that deals with much of the same subject matter, but introduces movement into the colorblind template. This work uses the Ishihara test as a veil for the sex act, directly challenging the male gaze and its possession of sexual desire through vision.

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Origin of the World (Britney)

2010

“The Origin of the World (Britney),” is an appropriation of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting by the same name (“L’Origine du monde”). The image, a remediation of a paparazzi’s capture of Britney Spears' crotch, has been printed on canvas—which suggests that by altering the output of the original snapshot, it somehow raises the validity of the image—and further nodding to the historical inferiority complex of photography to painting. Moreover, the gold, gilded frame reiterates the elevation to highbrow art—in both Courbet’s painting as well as my own.

With one-hundred and fifty years between them, both Courbet’s painting and Britney’s contemporary image proved to jolt their respective cultures and likewise were commissions by a second party. The two images assault the viewer unapologetically—with identical subject matter, solely dependent on its context for cultural reaction and reverence. Courbet’s title is a testament to the on-going paradoxical concept that all innocent, human life emerges from this portal, which remains potentially offensive when depicted in paint or pixels.

Around 2007, a growing trend arose within the celebrity pop-queen (formally pop-princess) demographic: flashing their genitals as a rite of passage as a “fuck you” to the media. Though swept under the rug (no pun intended) as accidentals by the subjects, ET-type television shows agreed that this must be the premeditated actions of attention-hungry “celeb-pops.” The third-wave movement, specifically the concept of regaining control over derogatory portrayals of the female body through mimicry and performance, could be influencing such behavior, or perhaps driving it. I believe this correlation to feminist theory, as well as the mother/mistress conflict manifesting itself in several of the mainstream celeb-pops, to be what inspired “The Origin of the World (Britney).”

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Love Swing

2006

“Love Swing” is a piece that speaks to the wavering stability between woman as nurturer and woman as object of sexual desire. The 82 inch tall by 68 inch wide swing is covered in knitted yarn and fitted over a prefabricated sex-swing stand. The inner hanging swing has no core, prefabricated framework but was designed based on images of manufactured sex-swings. I chose a cream colored fiber to play off the idea of innocence which is typically unassociated with the sex industry. At first glance, the viewer might mistake the structure for a baby swing, rather than a sex swing. The hanging swing is slightly separated by clear thread to give it the appearance of form. The entire project took 3 months to create and approximately 30 skeins of yarn.

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