Ross Manning’s Ambient Paintings (2019–ongoing) series channels ambient light to create color and patterns on the surface of blank substrates, which are likened to canvases. These various-sized “paintings” are composed of dichroic glass filters mounted to the substrate at 90-degree angles. When the ambient light hits the glass filters, it splits into different wavelengths, creating color and pattern on the so-called canvas. As the quality and intensity of the ambient light changes, the painting’s composition changes; in this way, the work is a simultaneous reductive and expansive reading of the space, variable from moment to moment.
Ross Manning
Emerging in the early 2000s as an experimental musician, Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning shifted his artistic focus from performance to installation in the intervening years, transitioning from a practice focused on playing instruments with obvious interfaces to working with site-specific locations and seemingly inert materials he coaxes sounds and experiences from. These installations embody processes of transference and translation, harnessing invisible energies and rendering them into soundscapes, refracted light configurations, and moiré patterns.