David B. Smith Gallery

Dealing less with the supernatural than the psychosomatic, Christopher Russell rouses ghosts. Within his scratched photographs, fractured glass panes, and hazy metallic paints, there are haunting recollections - the kind of outlier memories that plague our psyche well after childhood. Through a purposefully repressive fog, we habitually revisit the monsters of our innermost mentality, and find ourselves the protagonist of a lifelong plight - a cinematic tale evocatively illustrated by Russell's eerie ships and spectral trees. Like a folkloric odyssey into a cognitive web, his mixed-media works and installations traipse through places of fragility and wistfulness; evidence of the divine and unsettling encounters inherent to our complex mortality.

Russell received his MFA from the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA). Russell has been featured in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA) and selected group exhibitions include presentations at the The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA), Tokyo Institute of Photography (Tokyo, Japan), and the De Appel Arts Center in the Netherlands. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Getty, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography amongst others. Russell is currently based in Portland, OR.