CHAMBER: Nicole Ross
Utter Rubbers
January 21 - March 12

lower_cavity is pleased to launch CHAMBER, a new exhibition series serving as a complement to the artist-in-residence program, with an exhibition of recent sculptural works by Nicole Ross. Produced in the summer of 2022 during a residency in Lisbon, the works apply intuitive, gestural interventions to a range of found industrial detritus given to Ross as a set of prompts by fellow resident and collaborator Johan Buskov Romme. Formally elegant and viscerally charged, the resulting objects hover in a space of uneasy familiarity, near-recognitions that evoke bodily transformations and failures. Ross’s manipulations are always simple and clearly discernible in their operations; exploiting inherent topological and formal qualities in her materials. Through this, she locates an underlying agency in the materials themselves, a coming-into-being immanent within the cast-offs of industrialization and mass production.

Nicole Ross's practice responds viscerally to the alienation immanent within contemporary corporeality. Propelled by the urgencies and ecstasies encoded into our hyper-saturated present, her work surfs the boundaries of physicality and visual cognition. In her sculptural work, Ross exposes the animacy of unassuming objects and materials, amplifying the chance poetics of form through which a latent agency reveals itself. Her drawings, photographs, and video animations merge the unexpected lyricism of the sonic landscape and calligraphic writing with the slickness of industrial manufacturing and the romanticism of cast-off organic ephemera, synthesizing these elements into a slyly elusive syntax. Ross’s work continually teases us with the promise of some almost-recognition, only to retreat again into a surfeit of information that eludes our grasp. Her world is oil-slick slippery, but a real gas.

Currently based in the Netherlands, Ross received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 and will complete her Master in Artistic Research at Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2024. Ross has been an artist in residence in Lisbon and Barriero, Portugal and shown work in the Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary, and the United States.