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        Ross Racine (New York) (see images below) Ross Racine, a native of Canada, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Université de Québec à Montréal and his Master of Fine Arts and a Graduate Diploma in Computer Science from Concordia University, Montréal. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Canada and the United States including Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Edmonton, New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Kansas City. Drawn freehand directly on the computer and printed on an inkjet printer, Racine’s drawings do not contain any photographs nor scanned material. The works are completely drawn in Adobe Photoshop, with pen and tablet, aside for some preparatory work in Adobe Illustrator. In Photoshop, Racine starts from a blank ground and builds up the work with a small set of basic tools and commands, such as selection, painting and cloning, copying and pasting, layers, luminosity and contrast, grain and smoothness, and automation. In short, the process is a combination of drawn material and various transformations done to this material with the help of the software. Racine’s work is a commentary on today’s ever expanding suburban environment. It highlights the threshold between city and country and between so-called ‘progress’ and ‘preservation’. Racine’s work also draws attention to the increasingly dissolved edge between the virtual and the real, where our understanding of the truth is always in question. Racine brings to light the growing paradox of everyday living where we seek to balance issues of community, convenience, and conservation with privacy, self-reliance, and integration. Racine’s digital drawings are a reflection of both the fears and the dreams expressed in suburban culture. But perhaps more than anything, his work encourages us to simply smile and enjoy the patterns of our existence. |
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