PROTO
over. The Bay Area not only has this great technical
culture, it also has a technological counterculture.”
Technophile splinter groups with “thousands of
opinions” expanded Ross’ sense of possibility.
But a fascination with technology was a long way
from the kinds of biological experiments that Ross
currently produces. Perhaps predictably, it was his
day jobs in other professions that led him to the
natural world.
“Mushroom hunting unlocked it all for me,” says
Ross, who stumbled upon his obsession in the days
after art school when he supported himself as a
cook at a summer camp. He loved to eat, and when
taken along on a hike with a
fellow cook, he found that searching for his own food in the wilds
offered a much different sense of
nature than the alienation from it
that he felt growing up.
“It was a way that I could also
pay attention very critically to
my environment and the subtle
things going on, because it’s
so high-risk: you do the wrong
thing and you’re dead. You spend
time learning about this thing or
find experts who you trust. Who
do you trust with your life?” His
interest in mushrooms led to
learning about the trees they grow alongside, and
from there the expansion was infinite.
Ross changed jobs, this time to become a
hospice caregiver. Grueling work, its constraints
wouldn’t let him go out in the woods mushroom
hunting, so he became determined to teach himself
how to culture and grow them at home, reading up
on scientific protocols. Though they used a different
language, the protocols for mushroom growing
resonated with his cooking experience. “The tools
were all the same, and even the procedures: steaming, and baking, and thinking about cleanliness.”
It all came down to having a recipe.
Once he realized that working in a lab was like
cooking, he jumped right in and started building his
own laboratory (see MAKE, Volume 07, page 102,
“Home Mycology Lab”). “It wasn’t too complicated.
Doing biological research is really easy. You’re dealing with biology, and it’s everywhere around you.”
Ross’ most ambitious work yet debuted in late
October with Bio Technique, an exhibit that he
“You can just sit and watch
the grass grow and come up
with phenomenal postulations about the nature of life.
A notebook is pretty much
all that Darwin had, and he
did pretty well.”
instinctively bash an installation. With Junior Return,
comparisons with bonsai are apt, and frequently
made, but what’s remarkable is how often parents
project onto the work concerns about their own
caregiving, or how office workers recognize a
metaphor for their own highly regimented lives.
Ross wants to address those issues, and also
something a little more fundamental in how we
think of ourselves. “It’s thinking about how we
actually form the Earth, and where we are in the
waste cycle, or in the consuming cycle. It’s part of
our ‘animalness’ that we don’t just own materials or
solidify materials — they pass through us in specific
channels or streams. But we don’t think like that,
or think of ourselves in biological terms. We think
of ourselves in terms of artifacts.”
Not always, of course, and one is reminded of
Buckminster Fuller’s famous proclamation, “I seem
to be a verb.” Ross’ work follows up on Fuller in
attempts to conjugate that verb in all its tenses. A
willingness to ignore categories in favor of following
what seems most interesting is something Ross
seems to have picked up on the West Coast.
AFTER AN ADOLESCENCE SPENT AS A
self-proclaimed “straight-D student” in New York
City, Ross moved to San Francisco to study at the
San Francisco Art Institute. The Bay Area’s thriving
technological experimentation was inspirational,
with hotbeds of activity stretching from industrial
artists like Survival Research Laboratories to
corporate innovators like Xerox PARC.
“Compared to the East Coast it’s a lot easier
to integrate these different worlds; people cross
28 Make: Volume 12
