Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Philip Ross

Artist, amateur bio-engineer and member of the San Francisco mycological society, Philip Ross uses living organisms as the inspiration and means by which he makes his work. Through the design and creation of highly controlled environments, Mr. Ross manipulates, nurtures and transforms a variety of living species into sculpture. His work lies at the disparate intersection of homegrown technologies, folk art, and ecological studies.

Philip has worked collaboratively with a number of institutions. In 2001, The Exploratorium in San Francisco invited him to be an artist in residence for their Life Science Department. While there, he designed and constructed a hydroponic garden-fountain for their Traits Of Life exhibit. He has also worked with the Johnson Oyster farm in Tomales Bay, just north of San Francisco, where he devised a method of growing a colony of oysters onto an armature, a three-year process that produced a twenty-foot long architectural structure composed of a mass of fused oyster shells.

Philip will be showing his work in the Perth Biennial of Electronic Arts this fall and his writing will be featured in the spring issue of M.I.T.’s Leonardo magazine.

Philip recently had his work in a solo show at Machine in Los Angeles. The show included a series of Reishi mushrooms grown into highly artificed forms, the aforementioned sculpture grown out of oysters, and a self-contained survival capsule for one living plant. These sculptures are at once highly crafted and naturally formed, skillfully manipulated and sloppily organic.

www.philross.org
www.machineproject.com