A visual artist whose first love was drawing, he initially didn’t think very seriously of the photos. Even before his good friend William Eggleston turned to color, Christenberry had begun photographing with a Brownie camera he received as a Christmas present in his teens, processing the film at drugstores. They are signposts along a trail that passes by Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama (1974–2004), twenty 4-by-5-inch pigment prints that Christenberry made over the course of three decades-some of the small, square, serial photographs for which he’s best known and often misunderstood. Two more works by Ross hold more red dirt inside containers for memorial flags, but the triangular shape of the frames makes them appear as if they’d been plucked out of a pasture of pyramids. William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1974–2004 Mining, digging, moving through, replanting, Ross and Christenberry are working with the same dirt, that red earth. There seem to be as many of those per capita-as those of us who are from these places can attest-in a rural Southern town. It feels less like an exhibition than a spiritual dimension-a Hale County of the mind-and also a real and actual physical place: a forest in which the people of Ross’s photographs move across time, finding their own place among Christenberry’s dream buildings and monuments, barns and slowly transforming buildings, among trees, and among churches. But they converse meaningfully, powerfully, in this group of selected works: paths that crisscross, overlap, double up, converge and diverge. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), his transcendent and acclaimed essay-film, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2019.ĭespite being artistically anchored in the same place, Ross and Christenberry, who died in 2016, did not meet in life. Ross, a photographer, artist, writer, and filmmaker whose childhood geography followed the paths of a military family’s relocations, lives both in Rhode Island, where he teaches at Brown University and, since 2009, in Hale County. ![]() Ross fills in the space of the line drawing with brown crayon, giving color to the child’s skin the house and its pointed, triangular roof are left paper-white. That red earth rises to meet the countenance and consciousness of a Shel Silverstein drawing-Ross’s appropriation of the cover illustration of A Light in the Attic, featuring a kid with a house sprouting straight from his head, framed under glass surrounded by more Hale County dirt. RaMell Ross, Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land Altar, 2021 “He would bring home boxes and boxes of red earth, and he had a screen that he made, so he would take it out in the back yard and sift it,” Sandra Deane Christenberry, his wife, told the New York Times in January. He’d eventually adopt the word earth to describe the substance that he’d carry back to his home in Washington, DC. “It’s soil! Soil nurtures life!” But soil, he lamented, inevitably came out as soyl in his Tuscaloosa-born accent. ![]() “You don’t call it dirt, son!” Christenberry recalled in a 2005 Smithsonian lecture, quoting the redressing he’d once received from an Alabama agronomist uncle. ![]() They are herding animals’ footpaths to water, they are shortcuts sometimes, or they are secret passageways, or they are escape routes, or, particularly when it comes to the impressions left behind by human footprints, they are often driven by some less practical, enigmatic impulse.Īround a corner, that same dirt appears in the base of a sculpture of a barn painted green, by William Christenberry. ![]() Desire paths, meaning those trails worn into the ground contrary to roads planned and paved. It’s the opening work in William Christenberry & RaMell Ross: Desire Paths, an exhibition in the form of a dialogue, at Pace Gallery in New York. In Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land Altar (2021) by RaMell Ross, red dirt undulates in triangulated peaks, toward a horizon of what appears to be the roof of a house. The first landmark you see is red dirt framed in wood, behind museum glass-Alabama red soil, crucially.
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