Prairieside Forks by Ross Racine

Hello collectors! We're interrupting our regularly scheduled writing with a note from Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of Jen Bekman Gallery. He's pulled together our fabulous summer show, Land Use Survey, which today's edition-maker, Ross Racine, is a part of. You have less than three weeks to visit 6 Spring Street, NYC, before the closing on August 15th, to see the show that's been written up as "at once elegiac, angry, and bedeviled" on Dwell.com and reviewed in Dart.

Without further ado, here's Jeffrey with a few words about Ross and Prairieside Forks:

At first glance, Ross's work appears to be very straightforward. Upon closer inspection, roads don't make sense and the humor in the patterns begins to show. Roads would never function like that, and what seemed to be unambiguous becomes a caricature of the endless miles of suburban sprawl. I love work that has humor and depth that unfolds as you view.

[Ed. note: Prairieside Forks definitely warrants close viewing! The size and scale of Ross's homes, trees and roads, and the infinite detail that is visible are important elements in the work. All of these things are totally altered at 8"x10" and smaller, so this edition begins with 11"x14" prints.]

Land Use Survey is a here we are; here is what we are doing with the land; here are the myriad ways we document and react to the land around us. In the exhibition, we included photography, painting and documentation of installation pieces, artists working both representationally and abstractly. As the nature of land use is diverse, so is the practice used by artists to respond.

Finding out that Ross works from his doodles is brilliant to me -- it laughs in the face of the studied patterns and geometries of planned communities. His lines, and their curves and patterns, are beautiful and satirical.

In the exhibition as a whole, there is no overly grand statement about man and our use of the land, but more an appreciation for the artists, like Ross, who are working within the wide topic of "land use" and landscape. We did not want it to be a show simply focusing on development and the destruction-through-construction idea. I think it is easy to focus on the dire -- on imagery of over-development. I wanted to show as many of the ways that the land is used and the assorted ways artists are capturing the environments around them.

As you view the show, moving from the left-hand wall around the gallery, clockwise, I began with untouched landscapes. Then, slowly, evidence of man's hand comes into the work. As you progress, the work becomes more and more about the urban and developed landscape and the resulting dizzying geometries. It is almost like when you are flying into the city and below you see forest and squares of farmland slowly transition into the grid of the city.

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Tomorrow we'll have another new-to-20x200 artist who is also featured in Land Use Survey. Till then!