Unititled (2008) – Ultrachrome print scratched with x-acto knife.

Solo Exhibition of Local Artist, Christopher Russell
The Hammer Museum – Santa Monica, CA
1/13/09
***
Christopher Russell creates “ripe ruins.”  He gives us sun-bleached, ripped, splattered, graffittied, murky, erotic, sullied, elegant evidence of resilience and destruction.  In his untitled installation for the Hammer Museum, as in much of his work, Russell’s human subjects have died off, fled, or been removed. We are left with their detritus: furnishings, stained bedspreads, scribbled notes, smears, empty rooms, and interior monologues that surface in tiny, eye-testing type emanating from the wallpaper. “I’m trying to look at this white trash residence the same way that Huysmans is looking at his environment,” he comments in discussing the piece.

Source:  Amy Gerstler from “Burned Out”

Untitled (2008) – Ultrachrome print hacked with meat cleaver. 24 x 36 inches.

Christopher Russell
The ocal artist uses Budget Decadence, his recently completed novella, as the basis for this installation. Russell creates an all-encompassing environment that employs text, photography, and handmade books. For his debut solo museum exhibition, he invites viewers into a world where the ideas and implications of family and home take an apocalyptic turn. Wallpaper that from afar appears to be the first chapter of his novella, and a series of photographs are conceptually linked to the story. Four artist’s books, intended to be handled and read by visitors, contain subsequent chapters of the novella and focus on the deepest inner workings of four related characters.

Christopher Russell – Trellis (after William Morris) 2008

***
For more on the artist, visit:  http://www.circus-gallery.com/artists/russell/

via EM Staff, 28 December 2008 11:34am | |