Brinda Roy

Boo Ritson's Back Roads Journeys offers a narrative split across two segments. 'The Diner', exhibited at Alan Cristea's Cork Street space uses still lifes of fast food and interior scenes characteristic of a typical American eatery to introduce us to the narrative's central figure, the Diner Waitress, who then abandons her old life and hitchhikes her way across the South.

The action thus shifts to The Gas Station, where Ritson takes the opportunity to introduce us to stock figures from American popular culture- the Cheerleader, the Hitchhiker, the Pin-Up- new characters the Waitress is likely to meet on her travels as her story continues over at Poppy Sebire's space (an itinerant gallery currently occupying premises on North Audley Street, which makes it seem particularly well suited to an exhibition about a nomadic journey).

Ritson's love for Americana, and her humorous take on cultural clichés are apparent. But more so than her content, what struck me immediately about Ritson's work is her style, and the impact of her chosen medium on my perception of the works. Using real people and objects as her canvas, she coats them with household emulsion paint, and has the resulting scene photographed even as the rich, dripping paint coagulates across human skin and food surfaces, forming an increasingly evocative tactility of texture.

But rather than simply enhance the colours already existing in the scene, Ritson chooses to paint her models partially or even wholly in white, negating significant portions of her imagery. This results in a work that appears unfinished, but beckons me, the viewer, to complete the image, investing it with my own idea of what the finished scene should look like.

For me, this allows Ritson to achieve a masterly marriage of painterly concerns and connecting with her audience, drawing them into the whole process of image-making. This is no longer Ritson's play with Americana and cliché, but now it is also mine. I am not aware of Ritson's politics, but now I find it hard not to look at By The Roadside, a triptych of figures ranging from being painted entirely white to almost entirely coloured, as a negation of racial status in contemporary American society- on observation I feel is supported by the central image of a parti-coloured woman holding what appears to be a Obama sign.

It is this collaborative aspect, this investiture of the personal reading, that makes Ritson's works so memorable for me, working particularly well when a human subject is involved. Consequently, her screenprints of typical American diner food in Cristea's gallery didn't really appeal to me, perhaps because as finite and finished works, they engage only with Ritson's pop-cultural pictorial vocabulary, and not with anything the viewer has to offer. Only a few hours after the event, I can barely recall what they looked like- but I remember each drip of emulsion across every inch of human skin.