Exhibited at DESIGN MIAMI.BASEL 2024 Edition of 8/ Evolving from Samuel Ross’ ongoing interest in the historic visual languages of West African furniture, post-industrialized Western culture, modernism, and brutalism, SERIES 4 points to the links between body, material, meaning, and memory. The works in this series represent spaces of commune, community, generosity, and tenderness. A notion that, for Ross, is about geography; about the body and space, about the body in space.
Samuel Ross’ understanding of geography exists beyond the concepts of territory and diaspora. It extends to the material connectors between these elements: space, time, location, minerals, residue, erosion. Gestures are marked on the body as they are on stone or steel, and “a material’s memory can be re-awoken through process. Process can re-emerge, as though polymers, fibers and cells are awakening, or rebelling.” The title FIRE OPENS STONE points to this physical association and reminds us that both body and material are vessels of memory and meaning.
Ross' work asserts itself in space through mass, weight, and rawness. Industrialized materials such as fired wood, metal, stone, and marble are lacquered with turmeric, honey, and milk before being fired and re-processed. For him, these organic materials, speak of past hands, processes, gestures, and “carry memory, intentions and philosophies from the heartland in which they originate.”
Materials: nero Africa granite, glass fiber reinforced concrete, fired OSB, fired honey and milk patina, painted steel, polyurethane.
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