Scope and Contents: Ross Rosenberg
I am drawn to commonplace subjects such as chairs and houses because they are comfortingly familiar but at the same time they allow me to express feelings of mystery and foreboding. It is the ambiguity that involves me.
Most of the images are based on early childhood memories. The rounded chair, for example, comes from a memory of being in a dark living room at night. There is a dim light coming from down a long hall. I hear someone in the hall and I climb up onto the chair and hide between the arms on the seat.
The upright chair image is connected to the memory of watching my father making a chair for me when I was four years old. When I sat in it, my back rested against its back, my seat on its seat, my legs by its legs. Now I am both the chair and the one who makes the chair.
So although I do not work from a conscious program or a theoretical base, there are clear emotional lines running through all of my work.
PAINTINGS
The paintings of this rounded chair are seen from a child's eye level and they put an adult in the same size relationship to the chair in the painting that a two-year-old has to a real one. As this series developed, I began to focus more and more on discovering different ways to create texture. So some of them are as much about how they were made as why they were made.
DRAWINGS
The drawings of this rounded chair are, like the paintings, done from a child's eye level. Most of the drawings are as large as the paintings and they put an adult in the same relationship to the chair that a two-year-old has to a real one.
SCULPTURE
When small children sit in an overstuffed chair, the experience is like that of being held by an adult. The seat is like a lap, the child leans back against the chair and is held by the chair's arms. The chair sculptures were created with the intention of emphasizing this relationship between the chair and the human body. The two house reliefs are from early memories of houses on the steep hill on which we lived. They, and the chair relief, use the wall behind them as the ground rather than having a traditional shelf-like base.]
-- Ross Rosenberg
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