Portland Area Art Events

First Thursday art walk April 6, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Design Week Open House, April 25, 4:00 – 7:00 pm
Q&A with Virgina Heckert and Christopher Russell Saturday May 13, 4:00 – 5:30 pm

THE WORK
This exhibition briefly surveys bodies of work created by Christopher Russell over the last several years. Russell, now living and working in Portland, made his mark in Los Angeles with irreverent installations of altered photographs paired with transgressive, fictional texts that shared the chaotic aesthetic of his ‘zine, Bedwetter. Though he has regularly reinvented his practice to avoid easy categorization, his imagery is often ambiguous and fractured, reflecting his exploration of the darker aspects of the human psyche.

During a nomadic period of searching for a new place to call home, Russell’s process slowed down. His use of photography with laborious scratching into the print surface became more formally integrated and less driven by comparatively straightforward foreground/background relationships. Russell explains, “my process shifted into something where the photo and the drawing scratched into its surface work together, in a more dreamlike way; something that is neither a drawing nor a photo, but a hybrid.”