Jillian Kay Ross Sold at Auction Prices

Toronto-based artist Jillian Kay Ross bridges the divide between the Modernist legacy of painting and today’s digitally saturated world. Ross’ paintings appropriate the language of post-war American abstraction, valuing the materiality of paint and laying bare the canvas as support. The artist’s paintings testify to a strong deference for the canvas’ delimited space, exploiting its contours through measured mark making. Unlike her canonical precursors, Ross’ practice does not forego subject matter in favor of form. Rather, the artist’s reductive forms are culled from a seemingly infinite pool of digitally archived images, their formal qualities a result of the inability to retain and reproduce the density of this information. The unbounded library of the Internet consequently informs both the iconography and the minimal visual vocabulary of Ross’ work, so that 3 600 000 Google Image results for “Miami Heat” culminate in the painting of a red square.

Jillian Kay Ross received her B.F.A. from OCAD University in 2011 and was awarded the Mrs. W.O. Forsyth Drawing and Painting Graduate Award. Her work has been included in Taking [a] part, Mercer Union, Toronto (2014); More Than Two (Let It Make Itself), The Power Plant, Toronto (2013), and BYOB II, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), Toronto (2012). Jillian Kay Ross’s work can be found in several private and corporate collections in Canada, including TD Bank, and in the USA.