AndyT wrote a wonderful essay about my work, mostly drawings and some sculpture, for the show i’m having in greeneville in a couple of weeks. A very few of the pieces are on my site. Its going in a sweet card and i will probably do an emailing later. I would love for you guys to read it.    (look out!)    

Audrey Hasen Russell: Overlook

There are two worlds. One is constrained by space-time, money, and laws. The other world is nonphysical, a spirit realm of chance, fate, memory and premonition. As synchronistic events appear to conspire against you or serendipitously lead you to your destiny, the conscious self is confused and yearns for an explanation. Disjointed experience becomes personified through myths and culture as angels and demons, spirit guides and familiars. On rare occasions these two worlds intersect, either through diagnosable neuroses or in cultural works of literature, art, and theater. Writer Haruki Murakami uses dreams as keys to hidden truths and deceased characters appear as critical actors and guidance for the living ones. In Wild Sheep Chase there are the persistent letters from the nonphysical character “the Rat” and in Dance, Dance, Dance there is the man in the sheep suit and the deceased woman Kiki who all act as spirit guides for the main characters.

Audrey Russell’s drawings tap into the same characterization of absent players guiding and defining the subject’s (usually herself) context. The embossed images are not always readily visible but are always present and patiently waiting for the viewer’s quickly judgmental eye. It is surprising in our age of mediated experience that Audrey would so readily lower the visibility and immediacy of critical content within her work. The viewer is forced to slow down, recalibrate their interpretive mechanism, and ponder the duality of existence and memory.

Physically, Russell’s drawings and sculptures focus on that tricky element of surface: her drawings rely on embossed images that give the page topography: sunken lines versus forward resting graphite and pigments. Russell’s 3D works consistently employ hollow grid-like structures then covered or partially covered by “skins” of carpet, grass, rope.

The subject matter of her works deal with another slippery issue of memory and nostalgia: faded representations of place, a stuffed animal from childhood (the aforementioned familiar?), and self portraits that feel dissected from their previous contexts and now juxtaposed against these other resilient memories. The minimal graphite and localized color segments the drawing’s compositions into symbolic components of disrupted experience. The two worlds coexist and complete each other’s seemingly truncated images.

In this collection of work, drawings become thin sculptures that push the foreground (subject) to the front or top surface and press the background (context) to the back, or lowest level of the surface. This is literally the most appropriate application of the embossment and belies her sculptural inclination towards objects and hierarchy of space. Initially, the figures are like mega-focal points, islands against a white sea of negative space. This overemphasis creates a reverse psychology that turns the viewer’s curious mind to that seeming emptiness, yearning for something more. As designed, Russell obliges and produces whole worlds and spaces reminiscent of domestic and exotic locations. The viewer is drawn to this parenthetical presentation of context and sees ghost images, haunting representations of (un)remembered spaces and trinkets.

Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” speaks about the sculptor’s dilemma where sculpture has been defined as neither architecture nor landscape, and incidentally Russell’s reoccurring animal has at times become landscape or architecture for her subjects to inhabit. Her sculptural land(and body)scapes take on subterranean affects and are shoved in corners adding a level of secrecy and architectural grounding. For Russell, showing the underlying structure of the work isn’t simply a minimalist device of “truth of materials”, but prime real estate for mining the subconscious and exploring Gaston Bachelard’s oneiric ruminations reserved for the basement. Her newer cell structures remove the top layer to expose hive-like interiors reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois’s cells or Juan Munoz’s room installations with limited viewer access.

There is a kitschy lusciousness of color and materials, fake gold leaf, neon orange, and faux fur reminiscent of Dollywood Americana optimism. Here we have a sincere affection for what most would call tacky. The work settles into a nostalgic yearning for an imagined authenticity of mass-produced artifice. In our Post-Modern age of existential consumerism, truth is variable and outside of the natural order and as a result, seemingly banal things can be on the same level as concepts of religion and politics. Russell always manages to balance her materiality with personal imagery and narratives that give the viewer so much more to dwell upon than simply glitzy-kitsch that seems so pervasive in the art world of the last five years. Here, the viewer gains a glimpse into the multiple realms of Russell’s desires, humor, and loss.

Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and received his BFA in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. Thompson moved to the Detroit area to receive his MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since graduating, Andrew works as a collaborator with the Gallery Project in Ann Arbor as graphic designer and curator. Andrew teaches art at University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and Oakland Community College and currently resides in Royal Oak, MI