In the University Art Gallery, visitors will encounter a selection of Ross’ large scale photographs from Hale County, Alabama, and sculpture from his Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land and Propinquity series.
Grounded in place and embodied experience, RaMell Ross’ work is at once funny and haunting, everyday and timeless. It is double-edged. It is one thing, and then another. The artist troubles categories and definitions, even as he explores them.
Careful to consider the implications and conventions of his media—in the words he has applied to the camera and the photographic image, both magical and threatening—he reimagines the representation of Black experience in the southern United States.
In his photographs from Hale County, Alabama, taken between 2018 and 2022, Ross creates a loving portrait of a place and community. That portrait confounds the viewer’s gaze. Sometimes it looks back. In the sculpture included in the exhibition, Ross combines the relentless facts of materials like wood and red soil with quotations and allusions—to poet Shel Silverstein, to basketball, to fallen soldiers. The everyday becomes magical.
Ross’ conceptual installation Return to Origin occupies the Museum Gallery of William R. Laurie University Archives and Special Collections, inviting visceral, imaginative, and empathetic engagement with history and its artifacts.
In October 2021, Ross shipped himself in a 4’ x 4’ x 8’ crate from Rhode Island to Hale County, Alabama on the back of a flatbed truck. The trip took fifty-nine hours. During the journey, Ross began writing “black” before every entry in a childhood Webster’s dictionary, creating Black Dictionary (aka RaMell’s Dictionary).
The journey reimagined and reversed a historical precedent—Henry Brown’s 1849 escape journey from Virginia to Philadelphia, transported in a box approximately 3’ x 2.5’ x 2’.
Return to Origin models the embodied acquisition of knowledge. The objects, video, and sound of the installation invite visitors to accompany Ross in his journey. Unsettling, Return to Origin invokes the constraints of language, of historical moments, of oppressive economic and political systems, but also the possibilities offered by reappropriation and understanding.
