Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Michael Russell entitled “Breeze Shapes,” on view from March 4 to April 11, 2020. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. The public is invited to the artist reception on Saturday, March 7, from 5pm to 7pm. The artist will be present. Join the event page here.
In the exhibition Breeze Shapes, a continuation of a decade-long body of work, Michael Russell seeks to create pictures of calmness through a repetitive mark-making process. Small ink and graphite lines repeat in organized arrangements developing into minimalist compositions. The marks express the passage of time in grayscale and reflect the quiet nature of the process. Fluctuations in negative space and scale further emphasize duration as a subject matter. The drawings are of abstract shapes and free-floating forms, but imply much more in their precision. Russell sees them operating as images between defined architectures and amoeba-like figures; lungs expanding and contracting into different forms.
Seeking to comprehend the passage of time remains a prevalent aspect of Michael Russell’s work. “Through drawing,” Russell says, “I aim to expand the capacity for my own introspection, as well as for those viewing my drawings. Mark-making carried out in a linear fashion leaves behind an idiosyncratic trail; documentation of time spent. I view the trace of my hand less as proof of labor, and more as the intimacy of process being laid bare. Rhythm is explicit and builds up to exude stillness. Movement found to be present in the compositions is that of a light breeze. Sweeping gestures are either absent, or mimed with smaller repetitive marks. Although the compositions are carefully engineered, the evolving techniques used to color them in are rudimentary.”
Throughout the exhibition lightness and volume vie sympathetically for prominence. Many forms appear weightless and airy, while simultaneously feeling as though they could be full of mass. The varying weight of marks, and shifts in scale and emptiness, contribute to an oscillating sense of volume. Iterations of drawings are included in multiple formats to press assumptions of what is “actual size.” Other exchanges include inversions of positive and negative space. Fields of gray tones in certain drawings are duplicated in other works as empty silhouettes of the originals, leaving a largely unfilled piece of paper as the finished work. The layout of the exhibition affirms additional formal relationships between the drawings to encourage double-takes and generate moments of reflection.
Born in 1985 in Los Angeles, Michael Russell received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from UCLA in 2012 and his Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University in 2015. His art has been in numerous exhibitions at, among others, Santa Monica Prefecture, Malibu Circa 1990, and Control Room, in Los Angeles. Most recently, New American Paintings and the Hammer Museum’s Graphite Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts have published his work.
“Breeze Shapes” is Michael Russell’s second solo show at Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco.
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