off the wall: Joel Ross

Ross has long engaged dual audiences – both chance onlookers and art gallery visitors – with strategically and surreptitiously installed text-based sculptures and resulting photographs. His work activates our imagination and invites us to stop and consider some of the spaces we travel through or pass by every day: roadways, parking lots, alleys, abandoned buildings, and the dead space behind strip malls. His messages become voices in our heads tempting us to plug the gaps in these short stories, to puzzle out their meaning, and to speculate about their authors.