Image: Christopher Russell, The Spangle Maker 13, 2024, pigment print scratched with a razor, 36 x 54 in
Mark Moore Fine Art has announced the arrival of a new body of work by Christopher Russell from his most recent ‘Spangle Maker’ series, including the 2024 pigment prints ‘The Spangle Maker 13’, ‘The Spangle Maker 17’ and ‘The Spangle Maker 18’. Each is scratched with a razor, extending a practice in which photographic images are deliberately worked over by hand.
Russell begins with fuzzy or hazy color photographs made by limiting the lens’s functionality. The abstract pictures provide the basis for imaginary vistas before he scratches into their emulsion and, at times, paints over the incisions. The resulting works combine photography, drawing, painting and bas-relief.
The method runs counter to the polished finish conventionally associated with photography. Russell has described immediacy as the medium’s greatest asset, while observing that photographic conventions can heighten an illusionistic confusion between subject and representation. Dust, scratches and errant lighting have traditionally been problems to remove; in these works, the blade’s mark becomes a deliberate intervention. Russell characterizes it as an interplay between the immediacy of the hand and that of photography.
Russell instead introduces an action he identifies as undesirable to photographers: defacing the photograph. “In defacing the photograph, it becomes a Postmodern substrate for Romantic thought,” he has said.
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Russell photographs in some of the same land documented by Carleton Watkins 150 years ago, while approaching it, according to the gallery, from “the opposite end of the history of photography.”
Born in Sacramento in 1974, Russell received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design. He has had a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
