Adie Russell

This month at the Roos Arts in Rosendale: Stone Ridge-based artist Adie Russell. The most extreme perfect that exists, a solo show of Russell’s new video, drawings, and paintings, will be exhibited June 11 through July 23. An opening reception will be held on June 11 from 6 to 8pm.

After deciding to memorize Allen Ginsberg’s “America” by listening to a recording of the poet, Russell continued this process until the process evolved into her ongoing video series, the “Covers” project, which features the artist lip-synching to found audio recordings. “I was struck by how current the poem sounded,” Russell says. “The cultural references were dated, but there was something about the tone, the emotional and political feeling, that seemed to mirror the present.”
In videos like Never Had More Troubles, where Russell re-creates a 1967 interview between Merv Griffin and Richard Nixon, she brings a new meaning to the historical context.

Russell also uses the videos as a jumping-off point for paintings, drawings, and photographs. “The themes that come out of the videos, both in content and form, inspire me to make other kinds of work. They have a philosophical connection to each other.”

Russell’s most recent video, the most extreme perfect that exists, is a quote from the audio used in the piece: an interview with Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. In it, Bergman struggles to find the English words to describe the circumstances under which he wrote the script for his 1966 minimalist film Persona. Russell stands before a photographic backdrop of a flowering tree as sunlight dapples the branches.