Andrew Scott Ross received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He subsequently studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Ross has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including; The Museum of Arts and Design in New York, The Building for Contemporary Art in Geneva, Switzerland, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, The Guggenheim Museum's Peter Lewis Theater, The Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, The Knoxville Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum of American Art, The Weatherspoon Museum and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum Magazine, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, and Artsy. In 2016, Ross's installation Dry Erase was presented at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center for the Atlanta Biennial. He was included in the exhibition Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art at the Asheville Art Museum (image above) and selected as the 2019 Tennessee Fellow from South Arts. Opening in December, 2021, Ross will present a new version of his Century Zoo installation at the two-person exhibit Symptoms of the Future: ANCIENT WORLDS at OUT OF SIGHT gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. A concurrent event with his video work Curatorial Drift will take place at The Royal Academy of Belgium.
Interviewed by Cass Dickenson.
C: Why don't you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you’re interested in?
A: Hello, my name is Andrew Scott Ross. I'm originally from New York City, but I currently live in Johnson City, Tennessee, which is not far from here. I’ve been teaching at Eastern Tennessee State University for 11 years. I’m an interdisciplinary artist interested in the language of museums and how we represent history, which I've been focused on for roughly 20 years now. My methods span everything from sculpture to drawing, installation, video art. So it's very interdisciplinary.
Riding, charcoal on paper, 44 x 30 inches, 2023
Work completed during Andrew’s residency at Stove Works.
Riding (detail), Charcoal on paper, 2023.
You talked about the languages of museums, can you expand on that?
I grew up in New York City in a family of artists and jewelry makers, and museums were a big part of my life. We were raised Jewish, but we weren't very religious. But I spent so much time in the museum and the museum was the one place where there was a unanimous agreement that this was something that you could be faithful about, that everyone could come together for. Art and culture felt cherished. Specifically, institutions in New York, like the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, almost became like holy places for my family. When I started to grow up, museums were something that I started to question when I was questioning the structures that I was within, that I believed in. When I was just leaving my undergraduate degree, I started deconstructing my faith around museums and representation of history in earnest. Because of this history, museums are something I approach very personally. How I as an artist can be responsible to these institutions, and the relationships of these institutions to ideas like truth or fairness. What gets exhibited, what doesn't get exhibited, how an exhibit can present a personal psychology–my own concerns, my own baggage and my own biases.
How has your relationship to museums matured? Is there a sense of nostalgia for you?
I think I feel nostalgic in some elements of my childhood, like many people do. I have a love for those experiences. But just as much, I feel a lot of distance from my childhood.
I believe in museums. I believe that these places are capable of great things, and can bring our community together and in ways that allow us to navigate very challenging topics. And I do think being able to physically see things that are outside of your own culture is a very powerful thing. That can be a powerful experience in positive ways. But it can also be powerful in negative ways. Institutions will probably never be perfect, but our efforts to make them better is, I think, worthwhile.
Right, that potential is powerful both ways. As far as the work you're making, how is the work you’re making engaged with ,
So I’m currently making two new series, though. One series is kind of the very end of a body of work that I've been producing since 2011. In 2011 I made a piece titled Century Zoo. That piece was the genesis of this decade-long project. It all started from hundreds of drawings that I did in the Metropolitan Museum directly from the objects on display. I’d take them back to my studio and I kept drawing over and on top of them, to the point that it corroded the images. They got so messy, and so filled with my own imagination, my own fan kind of fantasy of his objects as I moved through that process, that they became fairly unrecognizable. And then I used all the detritus of that project as material for further installations. This created a dynamic where every time I would reinstall that exhibit, I was quoting it further and expanding on it with new information that I was learning about, about history–specifically, the very Eurocentric approaches to organizing space and time inside of encyclopedic museums.
Century Zoo VII (Detail), Mud, Paper, Charcoal, Acrylic and Wood, Dimensions variable, 2011-2018. Photo from installation at Gallery Protocol.
I took a short hiatus with that work and decided I was going to make a final group of sculptures that would hold the very last remnants of those worn and weathered objects that I have affected for 10 years. It's almost like a mausoleum for the remnants of my memory. Some of the experiences of these objects have these histories. And I was going to kind of encase those inside of this. So I've been working on those here.
With the other series, I’ve been playing with the idea of keywords within databases of history objects. Words that are supposed to indicate what you’re looking at in place of a title. So I’ve collected the words writing, lying, hiding and searching. I’m essentially going through historical databases and sourcing images using those keywords, and that information is what I use to construct an image of my own–in this case drawings. I'm very interested in how those words might affect you when you're looking at these drawings, and the play between the different objects. This lets me see the politics that determine what objects are presented within databases, as well as which objects I personally react to in this context. So far, I've done the drawings for “Running” and “Writing” and I’m moving onto “Hiding” now.
With your first project, you’ve conjured images of corrosion, detritus and mausoleums, which is sort of dramatic and macabre. At the same time, you're also starting this other work that is based on actions and processes, things that are actively being carried out. I’m noticing these projects are both exploring progress in different ways. Is this something that’s important to you?
Yes, this current project is much more active and alive in its processes. This work is serving as a break from my previous project, like where I wanted to put those elements from my previous work to rest. But I also want to recognize with my mausoleums that these images and fragments of history linger like residue in our bodies and minds. When it comes to history, we don't have control over the images that linger on with us before we were conscious that it'd be possible for that to happen.
The new work is active, but it's also representing the way I'm exploring images now, which is online. I'm looking at things not in museums but through a museum's digital collection. We're searching and we're looking for things in different ways now. But also I want to represent the dramatic changes that are happening in how we represent history right now. There are things that I'm so excited about, I would have only dreamed about happening 20 years ago. So I think with all of that turbulence and excitement, I want to talk about these things going on right now, but I also wanted to keep it open-ended because I have a bit of a distaste for closing arguments or for anything to be finalized. So I feel like the idea that these things are in motion or that it's at least trying to capture motion feels more comfortable for me in relation to representation and truth.
Thick Drawing (Heads), Wood, Polystyrene, Plaster, Paper Clay, 25 x 94 x 6 inches, 2023
Thick Drawing (Hand), Wood, Polystyrene, Plaster, Paper Clay, 44 x 62 x 6 inches, 2023
These works were developed during Andrew’s time at Stove Works.
So with these new projects, what is your time at Stove Works allowing you to do with this new body of work? How has your residency with Stove Works helped you?
So much! In every way, being at Stove Works has been wonderful. I have been extremely productive because of the balance Stove Works’ residency program manages to walk between the freedom and trust in their residents versus the resources and attention given to us. I feel like there’s just enough programming involving interaction with people from the community, some visiting critics that come here and speak to you, but that’s also balanced with having a live workspace that is extremely functional, clean, private and well lit. I also enjoyed the amount of residents and the scale of community that that created for us as well. And with all of the facilities downstairs, I’ve done a lot of the sculpture work that I don't always have access to. So I think it's been excellent. I’m sad to be leaving.
Is there anything we can look forward to from Andrew Scott Ross in the coming months?
Well, I have. I'm one of the current Art Fund grantees this year, and some of the work that I'm producing here is being produced for that. I’ll be presenting some of these works in public spaces in Johnson City, where I live.
That’ll be all. Thanks Andrew!