Ross Racine—Social Distancing
online exclusive
a solo show of works on paper by Ross Racine depicting aerial views of communities with fictional suburban design and architectural elements.
On May 9, 2020 most of the people IN THE WORLD are in some sort of quarantine, Americans have been staying at home in isolation for almost two months. As we sit at home and gaze at our screens of differing sizes, Front Room Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Social Distancing”, featuring the works Ross Racine. For many years, Racine has been depicting communities in isolation from a distance—without the people, and this is his 4th solo exhibition with the gallery.
Racine has created a world filled with realistic aerial views of fictional suburban communities. These works on paper present structural layouts of invented subdivisions, which in many ways illustrate the isolated conditions common in these types of developments. Racine’s developments take many forms: villages, cities and sometimes 2 house townships. There are never any people visible, although one assumes there are people there. One wonders what these implied people could be doing: are they watching “Tiger King”, making sour dough bread?
Racine’s work is photorealistic, but not photographic, completely created from beginning to end by the artist without a camera or a photographic reference. Racine is an omniscient surveillance camera in the sky, his world is filled with the contradictory bravado of a demented city planner. His suburbs have no zoning, roads go nowhere, or way too far. They are at once wholly improbable and completely possible, and they remind us how misguided we can be. They poke fun at human nature, at grandiosity, and impracticality.
Racine’s works are formed of line and texture, with the flattened plane of a satellite photograph—no horizon line, no sky. The subtle tones and photographic grain often veer almost to complete abstraction, only to be brought back by what is undeniably a house with trees around it and a garage. The buildings themselves become patterns, the uniform and also very random lines of the streets and the patchwork grains in the fields form uneven grids. These works on paper have as much in common with oriental rugs or quilted blankets as they do with Google maps. They tell a story.
Ross Racine's prints have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Europe, including the Des Moines Art Center, the Künstlerhaus (Vienna, Austria), the International Print Triennial (Katowice, Poland), the Koffler Centre Gallery (Toronto), the International Print. Center (New York) and the Front Room Gallery (New York). A selection of Racine's prints has won the biennial prize at the Biennale internationale de Gravure contemporaine in Liège, Belgium. His work is in several collections, including the New York Public Library Print Collection, the Des Moines Art Center, the Johnson & Johnson collection and the Hallmark collection.