Prairieside Forks by Ross Racine

Lately, 20x200 edition-maker Ross Racine has spent a lot of time explaining his art. First, he sat down to talk about his fictional aerial landscapes of suburbia with BreakThru Radio, then lent a hand via email to bloggers at TheUrbanTimes and Rising Wisely. To top it all off, UrbanSpaceMag added him to the pages of their Copy & Paste issue examining the essence of original and new.

In his interview with the Bushwick-based host at BreakThru Radio, Ross offered a bit of insight into why everyone is asking him to explain his work:

I’m in between drawing in the traditional sense. I’m in between the computer itself, and I’m in between photography. Photography is a reference for most people with this kind of image so that is something that I have to deal with. We don’t have that many examples of computer drawings so far that use realism, so we don’t have this reference. They know what a painting looks like roughly, they know what a photograph looks like roughly, but a computer drawing is something that has very few references.

What Ross so modestly left out is just how fascinating his fictional suburban designs are. Take a quick glance and you’ll see a sort of greyscale rendering of a suburban sprawl on Google Maps terrain view. Focus on his work for just a moment longer, and you’ll catch detailed complexity and a sense of playfulness, as well as a commentary on micro versus macro and the psychological effects of societal structures.

Ross delves deeper into the unrealistic details of his suburban sprawls in his interview with TheUrbanTimes. His creativity starts with scribbles, and he keeps and modifies the images he deems worthwhile. In this exchange he also touches on his fascination with abstraction and interest in diagrams and designs as a means for conveying information that's never said outright.

It’s exactly this narrative that caught the eye of the good people at Rising Wisely, a blog that rethinks India’s development. In this interview Ross explores his the idea of repetition in his work, which is exactly why UrbanSpaceMag picked up his art for their Copy & Paste issue on varying social perspectives on the idea of copying and pasting in society.

To read and hear about Ross biking around the suburbs where he grew up, the innate human desire to have a large living space and how he prefers the slippery qualities of a disembodied virtual medium, check out his recent press. Then go to the IPCNY silent auction by tomorrow, December 18th to bid on his work.