Edges of Distortion: Keith Ross in OBSERVER
In OBSERVER, artist Keith Ross presents three studies that probe the emotional and perceptual terrain of everyday life, including Taking a Punt on a Punt (2024) and From the Bottom of My Heart. Thank You. I Had No Idea Where I Was. (2024). Each work captures a moment drawn from ordinary movement or quiet pause: a figure mid-stride in an unremarkable street, a lone individual beside a parked car while a magpie lifts into the air. These scenes, while familiar, carry an undercurrent of vulnerability and introspection.
Ross’s practice operates on the edge of distortion. His treatment of line, gesture, and pictorial space bends the familiar just slightly out of alignment, creating a subtle but persistent tension. The smudges, shifts, and chromatic disruptions that animate the surface are not decorative gestures but conceptual ones. They unsettle the straightforward reading of each scene, pulling viewers into an awareness of perception itself; how it falters, slips, and reshapes experience.
Within this framework, Ross transforms everyday gestures into sites of emotional resonance. The works invite a slower form of looking, one that recognises the complexity embedded in unremarkable moments. There is a melancholic tenderness in the way bodies occupy space in these images, as if caught between presence and disappearance. The compositions are minimal, yet they hold significant psychological weight. They suggest that the ordinary is never neutral; it is layered, contingent, and shaped by the quiet pressures of thought, memory, and circumstance.
Placed within OBSERVER, Ross’s paintings expand the exhibition’s wider inquiry into how perception, environment, and emotion intersect. His contribution demonstrates how subtle pictorial disruptions can expose deeper registers of human experience. By lingering at the threshold between clarity and uncertainty, the work draws attention to the fragility and intensity woven through daily life.
Keith Ross’s work invites viewers to consider what emerges when the familiar is pushed toward distortion and when ordinary scenes are allowed to reveal their complex interior worlds.
OBSERVER is on view until 30 November 2025 at Romulus Folio Gallery, The Gladstone, 55 Gladstone Street, South Melbourne, 3205.
Gallery Hours
Wed to Fri 12 pm to 7 pm
Sat to Sun 12 pm to 5 pm
Or by appointment