Christopher Russell

The Explorers

The Explorers: Christopher Russell: European cartographers would once place drawings of monsters onto uncharted areas of their maps. It was a code to sailors that they were moving into an unknown area, and to proceed with caution. But these maps served a secondary role, to elucidate the world of discovery for people who would never be able to travel the seas. These maps offered a way of negotiating a new body of scientific knowledge while maintaining a grasp on primitive fears.

By the time Carleton Watkins photographed the west, the edges of the continent had long been known, and were generally understood to be monster-free. But what Watkins provided was evidence. His images of the new west laid to rest the drama of the gothic imagination and replaced it with the scientific certainty of pristine vistas. He used then-new technology to satisfy lingering questions about what the new world might hold. And while his project was compelled by Romantic wonder, it was also its last gasp, as the scrutiny of the photographic lens seemed, at least for a moment to offer answers. This is one way of understanding the twining of fact and wonder, the specificity of the lens and the evocations of the mind, that has made photography such an enduring medium.

And for me, that’s where materiality fits in, as a challenge to illusionism of the photographic medium. When I photograph in the Columbia Gorge, the same area that held Watkins attention 160 years prior. I fuck up the image before the light even hits the lens, resulting in images that are fuzzy, hazy, or just intellectually negotiable. I use that ambiguity as a starting point for my own imaginary vistas. For this exhibition, I’ve mixed interpretations of Watkins images with increasingly abstract approaches to the genre of landscape. Over the last 15 years, I’ve collected a number of gestures that deal with the the photographic medium and its material form. Most commonly I  scratch into the emulsion of the print. I also scratch into the glazing, the resulting marks throw shadows onto the print, a type of drawing that appears more or less focused depending on the quality of the lighting. I also paint over the scratches, creating an artwork that is at once a photograph, a painting and bas-relief. I also fold the photographic print which creates a slight dimensionality, allowing shadow and glare to shift across the surface creating a malleable viewing experience that changes with the angle of view. And these are explorations, given the breadth of knowledge facing an artist in the 21st century, this is a way of asking what’s more. What is there to satisfy curiosity that can’t be found on Google Maps?