Trey Ross

Maybe like the high noon solstice sun shining on the pools of low tide, putting on the right lenses lets you see things:

A slight change in the angle of sunlight is the shifting position in the aging of a star, is the change in season that with time rots flesh into fuel, the illumination that makes grains of sand galaxies in your eyes. Magnification is seeing, the kind that leads you into believing, and then substantiating, perhaps a convincing why for building sanctuaries with the energy of dead dinosaurs.

What looks like technology are really the workings of magic, of chance, change, and touch delineating, unbounding building block binaries not actually binding. Like the souls from the beaded eyes of an arachnid to the translucent body of a jellyfish, if you may one day know how to return their gazes, they will beam back your light—

because love is the work of magnifying each other’s light.

What is it like to have integrity to the material histories of the world, to any lived history, any personal story? Somehow remembering with whatever organs you have; memory uncorrupted is information etched, encoded in your body archive, through the gentle, steadfast work of building and re-building again on each material’s own terms of transitioning.

Stoneware or porcelain, moss doesn’t stop recognizing the earth. Remembering rootlessly, it reassures you that you are really who you are.

In the days becoming autumn, sculptures that stood still in moving time are the elongated shadows of the peak summer day’s light. Now before the audience in this garage gallery space, crafting, a solitary practice, becomes communal looking, a resonance emerging on the foundations of bricks, earth, porcelain, moss, words.

We breathe in and respire time, intertwining the poetic image of the future with the soiled fossils not yet beneath our feet, becoming the history of the land as land is lived through us, becoming, becoming, becoming, becoming…

—Grace Xu

Trey Ross (b. 1999) grew up in San Francisco, California. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and is finishing a BA in art at UCLA. His work engages ceramic and etching processes in an experimental practice that explores the natural, technological, and spiritual.