CULVER CITY, CA.- The Mark Moore Gallery announced the acquisition of three recent works by artist Christopher Russell for the permanent collection of The Honolulu Art Museum.
Founded in 1927, the Honolulu Museum of Art is Hawai‘i’s largest private presenter of visual arts programs, with an internationally recognized collection of more than 50,000 works spanning 5,000 years. In addition to the visual arts, film and concert programs, lectures, art classes and workshops make the museum the state’s cultural hub.
All three of the works acquired were recently featured at Mark Moore Gallery in the exhibition, Ersatz Infinities, a solo show of recent work by Portland-based artist Christopher Russell. For his second solo show with the gallery, the artist created a series of manipulated landscape photographs. Using a colored veil over the camera lens, the original prints are fuzzy impressions of forest scenes—seemingly underwater, awash in blood, or encased in amber. Russell then scrapes, gouges and scratches the surface of these prints with intricate, overlapping swaths of pattern. The individual marks are violent disruptions to the pristine surface of the print, a romantic impulse invading the field of mechanical reproduction, revealing the bright white glow of the paper's inner core.
In addition, Russell’s current show in Los Angeles, Ersatz Infinities, has recently received an outstanding review by Cooper Johnson in Artillery Magazine.
Christopher Russell employs photography, bookmaking, writing, drawing, and digital-media printmaking to illustrate his explorations of the darker side of the human psyche. Investigating, and sometimes fabricating, the reasons people live or behave outside of socially acceptable margins, his work offers visions of what many would deem dirty, broken, useless, or criminal. Through the lens of a present-day flâneur, viewers are made privy to Russell's observant, analytical wanderings along the physical and emotional outskirts of society.
Steeped in historical references, Russell seamlessly fuses photography, writing and object making to create all–encompassing environments that challenge the traditional divide between these practices and expands the very idea of what a book is. The seemingly disparate aesthetic elements of an installation are in fact deliberately chosen and constructed as reiterations of themes in the text. Heavy with the psychological implications of home, interior, and family, and inspired by decadent writers of the late nineteenth century, his narratives are rich in often unsettling details that build toward catastrophe. Simultaneously, Russell refreshes for our millennium the experiments in poetic strategies applied to prose by the New Narrative writers of the 1970s and 1980s, adding layers of meaning and possible interpretation.
Christopher Russell's artworks can be seen as portraits in absentia: of individuals and families who've fallen through the cracks, and of their ailing environments. Employing "intermingled layers of narrative and images," and materials such as floral fabrics, glitter, dirt, and hacked and scratched photographs, Russell gives us sun-bleached, ripped, splattered, graffittied, murky, erotic, sullied, elegant evidence of resilience and destruction.
In late 2012 his 7th publication, Pattern Book, with essays by Kevin Killian and Holly Myers was released. His 2011 novel Sniper, edited by Amy Gestler, is available in limited edition. Landscape, a monograph on his work, was published in 2007 by Kolapsomal Press. Russell edited and wrote an essay for the catalog that accompanied his curatorial debut, Against the Grain at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2008. Additionally, he has written more than two dozen articles and reviews about art in Los Angeles. Russell's work is in various public collections, including the Hammer Museum/Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, J.P. Getty Museum Research Institute; New York University; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
