↳ Exhibitions

Ross Iannatti at Ellis King

August 27, 2016

Artist: Ross Iannatti

Exhibition title: Oro Valley

Venue: Ellis King, Dublin, Ireland

Date: July 22 – August 27, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Ellis King, Dublin

Now, imagine a place that is peaceful.
Imagine a place that is the most peaceful.
Go there now.
A river,
the Hudson River. It’s morning and the sun is rising
over the Catskill mountains.
The air is chilled, October, there’s a low fog over the water out
past the window.
Hands resting in front of me.
You notice the small wooden table for two.
No lights are on but the room fills with morning light.
Soft.
Your hands rest on the old wooden farm table,
it’s paint forest green.
You pick at the lead paint peeling from it’s table top.
The room smalls of brewing coffee and extinguished sage.
Your eyes open.
Where am I?
The room smells like bleach.
Head splitting.
What month is it?
October?
No.
Should I call for help?
Perhaps drive to San Julian street.
Pickup the heroin prescription.
No, benzos?
The room still smells strongly of bleach.
It smells like a rag soaked in it.
A rag is on your face covering your nose.
You take a large gulp of water.

I read that Andy Warhol once said, “I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish…. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well actually, I’d like it to say figment”.

Neurofeedback, also called Neurotherapy, is a type of biofeedback that uses real-time displays of brain activity to teach selfregulation of the brain and it’s impulses from the brain stem into the amygdola and onto the temporal lobe. Neurotherapists studying the brains of meditating Tibetan Buddhist monks found that these monks had the ability to regulate the brain to the point that they lost all sense of self, space and time.

In Warhol’s series of Rorschach Test paintings, he makes a witty jab at established abstract painting. He describes the works claiming that the viewer would project their own narrative onto the empty abstract forms of the painting. I made these works in Oro Valley, similar to Warhol’s works. The etchings in the show aren’t about anything. These are just images of flowers. Some of the works are more recognizable of flora and some are not. Ultimately they’re about nothing, the viewer can make them into something if they want.