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GoTriad Spotlights artist Ross Holt Meet an Artist: Ross Holt Experimenting With Abstract Photography I guess I would say I attempt to make art using a photograph as a medium. My photographs are what the camera sees. I don't do any kind of manipulating other than cropping or enlarging. I don't change the image with color or anything else. I try to create something totally abstract out of something that is completely real. In doing that, I hope to create an image that jumps off the wall or pulls you in before you understand what it is. I'm trying to do something you don't see all the time, something that's outside of people's ordinary experience.Once a juror at a juried show awarded me a prize for digitally created art. I felt like that's what I tried to do. I had completely taken an absolutely real thing and somebody thought it was a creation of my mind. I had not misrepresented anything; they just assumed I had created it digitally, and that's not the kind of work I do. Finding His WayI have a friend who died some years ago; he was a retired Methodist minister named Dr. Phillip Shore, Jr. I am a librarian full time. He used to bring things by the library where I work. He knew I was interested in photography. He delighted in getting shots of patterns on decaying brick walls or complex shadows on the sides of buildings. I just got fascinated by that. That's how I got started with the more abstract stuff, the textures and surfaces. My subjects are the kinds of things that people tend to overlook or not think of as worthy works of art, like shattered safety glass in a warehouse door or the bumper of a teething machine or a rusted out dumpster. Mark Brown, the executive director of TAG Galleries, said that people think of photography as an associational art that reminds them of something or they feel like they've been to the place in the photograph. He said my work doesn't do that for people because it's so far out of their experiences. I like this. I took his words as a compliment.His Current Exhibit My show at TAG (Theatre Art Galleries) is called "Foment." The picture I chose to represent my show has the same name. It's of some kind of burned foam rubber sitting beside the railroad tracks in Asheboro. There's a lot of energy in the photograph. You think of seething or of being unsettled.There are 22 pieces in the show. The photographs in the show are all surfaces that have been weathered or damaged by the elements. There is a lot of decay in evidence because decay is what causes a disruption to the surface of something. Fire damage, water decay -- that's what makes them interesting. Abstraction and patterns are a common theme throughout. The History of a PictureMy aunt gave me an all-manual Canon SLR in 1981 for high school graduation. I messed around for a few years with it but never had any good ideas for subjects and didn't really know how to use it. But I had always been interested in history because of the history in this area, with a lot of it being colonial with Old Salem and Guilford Courthouse National Military Park around here. Being a child of the TV generation, I wanted to visualize the history. I wanted to see what happened then, but if you look at the art from that era it tends to be very primitive, romantic or stylized and not very realistic.I started going to these Revolutionary War reenactments around 1986 and taking photos. At first I didn't get good results, but I started teaching myself how to get what I wanted from the pictures. I started learning about exposure, how to compensate for bright sunlight, how to capture action and depth. I am self-taught. I am very proud of these [Revolutionary War] photographs. They are totally different from the abstract stuff, and they ended up being the other part of the show at TAG. So I have shows side by side and they show off two very different aspects of what photography can be.Poetic Inspiration T.S. Eliot had a line that said "good poetry communicates before it is understood." That's what I try to do with my photography. A lot of poetry is about a moment and so is photography. I don't want to stand over someone and say this is what my work means. Instead of the viewer trying to figure out some meaning I attached to it, I want my work to speak to them without that explanation.
I really like Paul Muldoon. I heard him read in college. He does the same thing I try to do with my photography in his poetry. His work leaves an impression that stays with you after you finish reading the poem. I hope my photography does the same thing.
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