The work of Jamie Ross undermines and destabilizes organized systems of human control over land, body and mind. The Apparition of the Wild: Unsettling Eastern Ontario represents a multisensorial act of resistance to the dichotomizing frameworks of historical hegemony. With a potent combination of emotional veracity and ecstatic wisdom, this challenging and engaging exhibition promotes alternative ways of understanding our surroundings — and ourselves.
Together, these works provide a skilful and provocative synthesis of voices, spectacles, sounds, and imagery that are transtemporal, cross-cultural — and elsewhere most commonly segregated from one another. Intensely personal yet outwardly visionary, what manifests is a composite portrait of Omàmiwininì Anishinàbe Algonquin and Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk territories and their multifarious inhabitants from an organic kaleidoscope of vantage points — human and otherwise.
Positivist knowledge and the documentary form are deconstructed in Fallow La Friche (2012). Nature’s unstoppable imperative is regrowth, and queer uses for the forest occupy and defy arbitrary divides between public and private. Masks and ritualized attire assert the presence of the supernatural. Statistical information is contextualized as one element of a continuous present and a broader truth, and an egalitarian narrative emerges in which a range of beings oppose being shaped by state apparatuses.
Texts and voices overlap in a Cagean aural soundscape: songs in Gaidhlig Gaelic, First Nations tongues, sounds beyond language — an automobile motor, rumbles within a Cessna, flowing tree sap. French/English bilingualism is acknowledged, but quickly exposed as an oversimplification. Facts and figures share space with music and poetry of origins before, during and after colonization. Subverting expected modes of discourse, the work thus resembles a crúiscín lán — a small jug brimming full — with emotions, meanings and subjectivities.
In Fallow La Friche and Two to a Blanket, Feet to the Fire (2012), walking, sitting, talking, dancing, laughing and fucking are all presented and meaningful and generative activities. Retracing an Ontario Colonization Road, Ross illuminates continuities between 19th-century homosociality between loggers and the explicitly homoerotic, communitarian ethos of queer pagans reanimating the same forest landscape today.
As a representation of resistance to rules of social and sexual order past and present, his vision of nude men penetrating one another on unceded land complicates our understandings of industry, freedom and self-determination. In this way, the anus becomes a symbol of beautiful, fruitful defiance, and a route away from colonization — of land, of the body, and of the mind.