Joel Ross
Nicholas Sistler: The Confounded Eye
Joel Ross’s installations dwarf the viewer. Measuring Texas, the principal installation in his show at Vedanta V-2, consists of 881 photos stretching across two walls in a grid. Size does matter here, since Ross set out to photograph every mile marker on the stretch of Interstate 10 that runs across Texas from New Mexico to Louisiana. And that’s exactly what he did. When a marker was missing, he photographed the spot where it should have been. The pictures share the rough-and-ready carelessness of a tourist snapshot, with each sign casually centered in the composition.
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Few viewers are going to look at every photo in order. But doing so produces a kind of irritated impatience, not unlike the actual experience of driving on this road, which traverses a rather repetitious terrain. The viewer starts focusing on little details–the way a distant hill in one photo grows closer in the next; the mile marker that’s defaced with graffiti; the commencement of rain around mile 724. That seems to be at least part of the point; the photos are taken with no more artistry than the signs are placed, so we’re left reflecting only on their content. Eventually I thought about the way our interstates represent a brutalizing homogenization of the landscape: supposedly drawing us closer together, they also isolate us, as we travel in metal cocoons, surrounded by familiar median strips and road signs. By focusing on mile markers, Ross, a Texas native who now lives in Chicago, highlights the arbitrariness of human measuring systems. His snapshots’ indifferent pictorial qualities are a perfect match for the mindless consistency of highway landscaping and signage. The scale and repetitiveness of Ross’s photographic journey make the deadening boredom of a road trip almost palpable.
The scale of Room 28 is as important as that of Measuring Texas. One’s awareness of the amount of space the suitcases both occupy and contain adds an imposing, real-world actuality to the wall label’s description. The size and scope of each piece convinces us that these activities actually occurred.
Golden’s paint brings sometimes stiff compositions to life, reminding me of the way memories can color one’s viewing of old black-and-white photos of family and friends.
The role of the painter here is less to unmask illusions than to create enchantment, though Sistler does both. A picture of a fractured bone to the left of the door reminds us that his optical tricks can also serve as a metaphor for healing–his illusion of a continuous line might be compared to the mending of a broken bone. A twilight view of water and hills is seen through the open door; as in many of his pictures, the composition leads the viewer to a mysterious, luminous place.
