(Header image: Detail from Joshua AM Ross, Swift, 2021, colored pencil and graphite, 37 x 31 inches.)

The CARE SYLLABUS interview: JOSHUA AM ROSS and ERICA WALL

Responding to the CARE SYLLABUS module, “I Can’t: Feeling Through Burdens of Care”, Advisory Collective member Erica Wall, Executive Director of MCLA Arts and Culture (MAC), spoke with artist-in-residence Joshua AM Ross on the occasion of his exhibition, “Come Inside,” on view at MCLA’s Gallery 51 through May 20, 2022. In their conversation from January 2022, Wall and Ross touch upon:

creative journeys;

non-negotiables;

the “choice” to care;

the artist’s responsibility to their collaborators;

artistic labor and the viewing experience;

the artist’s voice;

and finding and nurturing artistic community.

Erica Wall (EW): I feel excited and honored to do this interview with you. One point of departure for this conversation is Maggie Nelson’s work, On Freedom, and the distinction she invokes in her discussions about demarcating the ways that we can and cannot care in our creative work. I’m really hoping that we can explore the concepts and associations around care in your practice. First and foremost, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice, how you got to this place in your career, and how you became an artist in residence here at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA)?

Joshua AM Ross (JAMR): It's been a journey! While I identify as a photographer, right now I'm working on a series of drawings. My creative process is organic: things stimulate me, and I respond to the central ideas that they present.

I'm from Indianapolis, and that's where I studied photography and art. I went into graduate school immediately after, at the University of California Irvine. I learned quickly that it was an environment open to experimentation, counter to my earlier experience which was more traditional, methodical, and technical. Graduate school gave me a sense of permission: there were no differentiations between medium-based practices, and that allowed me and my cohort to explore what we needed. I’ve stayed in Los Angeles, getting my grips in the city and engaging the community here, and three years later, amidst the pandemic and amidst introspection, I felt it important to look outward, and that brings me here – to North Adams, a very different place.

EW: The body of work that you created at MCLA is drawings. When I first met you after you had graduated, I got to experience your photographs. You had just started to introduce textiles and garments in these photographs, and by the time we invited you to participate in this residency, you were deeply exploring the drawings. I think people are going to be amazed by the through-lines across these works. I was hoping you could tell us more about your methods of making.

JAMR:  My methods are integrated. I work with photography, image-making, and drawing, and I also work in a sculptural manner with fabrics. Early on, my wires were crossed, and there’s a way that these mediums act like language. They can't be disentangled or thought apart from one another. There's a charge that’s created because of the relationships between them, and because of how dependent they are upon one another.

EW: There are so many different ways to engage with the notion of care in your practice, especially in relation to motivation, consideration, and intention. There’s an exceptional amount of consideration and care that goes into each piece. In your photography, for example, you show care in the conceptualization, in the execution (traveling to different places to complete the work), and also in your intentionality of presentation around what viewers will see and experience.

JAMR:  Thinking about my photographs, for example, I find it important to share as much information as possible with who I’m working with: my interests, their interests, my sensibility, their sensibilities. How do we have a new experience with another? It’s not just about the work that I’m doing as the maker.

With the garments that I was making for my photos, they originally came from my imagination, from my conscious relationship to my body and to the means of representation I had to work with. The drawing and sewing classes I took were related to my interest in vogue dance, to ideas about abstraction as well as possession, and I was wondering how to activate abstract space and organic forms. There were a lot of layers involved in this.  Figuring out who to work with meant pursuing relationships that happened through friendships, and through thinkers in my environment who were asking similar questions as me.

Through these shared conversations, we could begin to negotiate: for example, what type of material do you want on your body? The thought process really has to do with what specific people want (in the Zhani series I wanted a soft fabric, or in the Kumi series, my collaborator wanted a translucent fabric.) There is a sense of openness on both sides. And as we spend time together, like on travel to destinations to complete the photographs, we sense out the appropriate solutions. It is an elaborate process.

EW:  I wanted to ask you more about collaboration as a tenet of care in your work. Where is there room for compromise, and what’s nonnegotiable, in your research process and your creative commitments?

JAMR: Time is a really crucial aspect. It’s non-negotiable: these projects happen over long periods of time, and I’m managing them with other people, who have other responsibilities. It’s non-negotiable that my considerations, or my collaborators’ considerations, will be put aside or rushed.

Say there’s a fitting with an artist and something becomes urgent in their life or mine – I can’t not consider that. Or one of my collaborators has an ailment – she’s vocal about not being able to do certain things in her performance. And my answer is: “Don’t! Don’t stress yourself.” Working with her, we produced some of the most flowing images by listening to her, by making sure I didn’t ask her to do something she wouldn’t be comfortable doing. It’s getting comfortable, in this sense, with dealing with difficulty.

Dealing with the “can” and “can’t” in terms of care is difficult for me – I think it's a matter of will and will not. Cannot feels more like a physical limitation, and care seems more like a willingness to understand the conditions that inform our lives in various ways, that have an effect on our ability to engage and be with one another. It’s difficult for me to suss this out: “What is with this ‘can’t’?” It strains something in me, because you can’t not care.

EW: If it’s a matter of will, as you’re saying, than it sounds like a choice. And there’s an argument that some people have different choices than other people based on different conditions. When you consider care as part of the process, I hear you saying that it's really not about a choice to care. But maybe for some, there is a willingness to care more about something than something else.

JAMR: I really like that you brought up choice. In collaboration, it’s about staying committed to the things that you’ve stated as your goals. It is about a commitment to this greater good in the process, and about working with a similar vision, because that means that you can work through what comes up if there’s a shared objective.  

EW: This makes me think about a related question: what are you willing to do in order to realize your vision? In the drawings, there is an intense amount of physical labor that extends these other forms of care that we’ve been talking about. You’ve chosen to do this recent series in pencil. The scale of the work makes it laborious, and you compound that with your painstaking process of adding color. If it takes you a year to do a work, it seems to me that you’re not going to compromise that. And CARE SYLLABUS was built around this idea of slow looking and taking the time you need, and so I was hoping you could share more about how these ideas play themselves out in your practice. 

JAMR: I don't think about labor until it's too late. For me, it’s about being committed instead to the desired effect produced by the work, to the thing that I’m after. I’m willing to go through whatever process that might be because I don't want to settle for something else. Even if it's arduous and challenging, I feel so much satisfaction and fulfillment, which is very much part of the objective.

I don't want people to see the labor, or think about labor, when they see my work. Throughout the process, I talk to my collaborators about how my body is doing and about the parts of production that can be monotonous. But I like getting to engage with others, it’s not a painful process. And when I think about how others see my work, I hope they can get a real sense of satisfaction in the viewing, too.

EW: This body of work provides an entry point to show us how many ways you question conventions that exist, specifically, around race, color, blackness, and practices of opacity, among other ideas. It is work that requires an immense amount of research, and you have talked about other artists – such as David Hammons, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold – whom you’ve described as approaching the same ideas, even as a feeling part of the same family as them. How would you describe care that goes into, and comes out of, the research you conduct?

JAMR: Finding your voice as an artist – listening to other voices, visually reading, figuring out how to ask questions that are central to your creative development – is the longest journey. In terms of the people you mentioned, there’s something about the concept of presence, their visual voices, and my peers voices, and my voice. It feels like a process of differentiation and a process of finding the thread that holds the work together. I have a large investment in listening to myself, and trying to unpack things that I’ve written and done.

Visual art is, in this sense, a voice. And thinking about this visual voice, I ask, how do I get the material to speak about the relationship that I have with these objects? And how do I convey this to other people? Because some things are hard to say, especially around questions of race, gender, or sexuality. We have limitations, and I feel limitations, and so a part of this question is about social positioning, and a part is about how you create a space where people can be around the objects and ideas that concern you.

I read a ton, and I listen to a lot of different thinkers, and I like that everyone has a singular way in which they research. After grad school, my level of investment with visual artist’s voices became central. We should not center scholarship as much as we center our investigations with material. It feels like a pressure to validate through theory sometimes, but for me, the artwork I really care about is valuable because of the proposition that it has, and not necessarily because of what shape it has taken within the whole ecosystem of the artworld.

I think that our lives, our wellness, the way we navigate the everyday, is really crucial to the work. And I try to find ways to put into practice my lived experience within the work. I also like blurring the boundaries about how we think about the artistic encounter – it not just the object’ it’s the walls, the space, the conversations that we had in the process of making the work, and around the work 

EW:  How would you describe your responsibility to the viewer, in relationship to the research in your work? You’re really clear about your intentions as an artist. Do you care if your intentions are what’s absorbed or recognized by the people who see your work?  

JAMR: What I want is for there to be many conversations that we can have around the work. To be a bit sentimental, I do want the work to be liked, especially by people who share values with me and who I believe I share values with – this is really rewarding and meaningful.  

EW: I think a lot of artists would say, there's people who like your work, there's certain people you value liking your work – and then there are people who you want to buy your work. [Laughter] If it weren't a matter of making a living, would care factor differently into your work?  

JAMR: My mobility in the world is more of my concern than a dollar amount. Being able to see certain things out, and to have access to certain experiences. I want to talk about seeing – the seeing eye is like a thought, that allows you to go someplace, or wonder something. I would conflate the terms seeing and thinking, because when something crosses your eyes, there’s possibility in that movement. So I really like it when viewers see something and go somewhere else with my work. I’m like, “Yes! That’s the language at work.”

As we’ve been speaking, I’ve started to think about how much this work is about the viewer’s sense of freedom or liberty. I work with fabric, a material that can hold a structure and lose its structure simultaneously. That's my real investment with that material. The longer that I work with that material, the images started to adopt that state – to take up a form and to lose that form as well. I don’t want the viewer to be constrained by my ideas, in a similar way. My work is not saying “be free” in a conventional sense, but I do work with images in a way that is about more than my capacity to think about them – the images hold something more, other places to go. That’s freedom.

EW: What you're describing is a very intimate experience with the viewer in your work. I want to bring it out, into the art world context – within a gallery space or a museum, there are a lot or dynamics that influences this mobility that you've talked about. Do you care for the way in which the art world cares for artists? 

JAMR: I want to answer by leaning into my experience of being in Los Angeles and really learning what community is and like, what my values in community are, how many different communities exist there, and how many facets formulate a community. There are so many different art worlds. For me, community is aligning myself with people who I can learn from, who think differently, who have strong minds and who really care about art and artists. When I’m saying caring about artists, I mean, caring about artists developing, finding their voices, and being practitioners in their own right. This means connecting with people across ages, across different paths and long careers that feel full of caring relationships.  

I want to be an artist until the day I die, and I need to learn from people who have long term practices. I look to practices that culminate with some peace of mind. I think centering the work is the best hope you can find for the things you need, and things that the work needs, in the art world. People who make you feel safe with your ideas and thoughts – those are the people you need. And it goes back to the way that I think about care. In terms of politics, we can talk about care in terms of activism and literally shaping the material conditions that directly impact people. And in terms of art, it’s not about the objects that I create, but about living by care, in the sense of art as a relating to myself, and to other people.  

About Joshua AM Ross

Joshua AM Ross holds an MFA in Art at the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. Ross' research-based practice is an entrenched phenomenological approach that investigates institutional, bodily, and spatial structures that organize and influence perception. Ross' multi-disciplinary practice employs and appropriates a variety of material and media developed through relationships to methodologies inherently related to his research and archival experiences of photography. Some recent notable exhibits Ross has featured artwork include Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Queens LA, and Human Resources Los Angeles.

About Erica Wall

Erica Wall is the Director of the MCLA Arts and Culture (MAC). In her role, she oversees MCLA's public art programs and spaces, including Gallery 51, DownStreet Art and MCLA Presents! Before coming to MCLA, Wall founded ERICA BROUSSARD GALLERY in 2016 in Orange County, California and in 2017, an artists’ residency, 36 Chase & Barns in North Adams, Massachusetts. Both spaces were dedicated to supporting the creation, exhibition, criticism and documentation of work by historically underrepresented artists.  

Erica’s career started in museum education where she worked at both large and small art institutions, most notably, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Crocker Art Museum, The Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Erica is also a previous Smithsonian Fellow and holds a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a master’s degree in Art Education and Museum Studies from California State University, Los Angeles.