Past ghosts inspire collaborative exhibit

They've known each other for two decades but their current joint exhibition at Everard Read Johannesburg is the first time that artists and friends Wayne Barker and Alexandra Ross have shown together.

It's a collaboration that reflects not only shared interests and playful approaches but also their unique individual concerns.

Barker's new body of work titled Postcards and Unwritten Letters thematically and aesthetically expands on his recent experiments with painting on top of silk screened images - this time of postcards of pre-democracy South Africa depicting inner-city Johannesburg, happy, whites-only Durban beaches and 60s sex mags in work that ''calls up the ghosts of our collective history".

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In her show Twenty Thousand Apparitions - inspired by the Ezra Pound poem In a Station of the Metro, ''the apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough" - Ross uses multiple media in her paintings and collages to evoke "the ephemerality of being and the transience of life".

As she guides us through the gallery, Ross muses that both she and Barker are "very tactile, but Wayne is more expressionist and I'm more impressionist".

Ross's large-scale paintings represent a departure for her and she's pleased that she's "been wanting to go big for a while".

Over eight months, working in shared studio space with Barker at Ellis House in New Doornfontein, Ross carefully shaped her ghostly pictures, using photographs as the basis for her approach. She says she tries "not to look at other people's images so I took the photos myself and then used them as a base. Sometimes painting directly on top of them and at other times using them as a reference".

The presence of the photographs is less obvious in Ross's work than they are in Barker's in which there's a mix of sometimes the considered application of streaks of paint and also a series of paintings where the addition of paint is more direct and expressionistic. In the lower room of the gallery Ross has hung a series of collages, which "feel different".

"When I was stuck with the painting I'd come to the collages and the collages freed me up for the painting. Collage is actually very difficult to do because you can throw stuff down on a piece of paper and look at it and think, 'wow that's amazing' and then go away for five minutes and come back and think 'I need to clean up this mess on the floor now' before realising 'oh no, that's a work'!"

Together, the two shows throw up ghosts from both the personal and historical past and for Ross, the chance to exhibit with her better known and, perhaps, more prolific old friend, "almost to the month coincidentally that I had my very first opening in the small room here at Everard Read", is an opportunity to progress to bigger and better things. As she says: "I feel I've done my ten thousand hours; it's time to move ahead - it's reflected in the work, it's more confident work."

• Wayne Barker - 'Postcards and Unwritten Letters' and Alexandra Ross - 'Twenty Thousand Apparitions' - is at Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg until May 27. Ross will host a walkabout at the gallery on Saturday, May 27 from 12pm.

• This article was originally published in the Times.