On View: April 16 – June 18, 2016
Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present Ersatz Infinities, a solo show of recent work by Portland-based artist Christopher Russell.
For his second solo show with the gallery, the artist has 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.
The space of the photograph, already illusory, begins to alternate between visual systems. Repeating patterns are used as stand-ins for personal and abstract sets of values. Unlike Victorian flower codes, with rigid definitions assigned to specific flora, the meanings of patterns are individual and fluid. They line interiors, envelop bodies and provide a glimpse of an ersatz infinity—the valiant attempts at replication falling ever short of the real thing. In the drawings, patterns are chopped into awkward, intersecting ribbons, free flowing signifiers jammed against each other and into the shapes of mountain peaks. The result is both destructive and revelatory—the patterns bringing to life the photographic subject’s inner world, or suggesting at the vast potential therein.
