Comme Ca Art presents

Works by ‘Amy Russell’

Panacea Bar & Restaurant
27th May – 17th Aug 2008
14 John Dalton St, Manchester

Graduating from Sheffield City Polytechnic in 1992, Amy Russell has exhibited her works in Australia, Italy and the UK.

Amy Russell’s narrative, autobiographical works combine paint and mixed media with collages of mundane print materials preserved from her day-to-day life to create striking, evocative and personal imagery.   The use of text and typography, cut from newspapers or printed with wooden type blocks, adds a strong graphical element to her compositions. This can also be seen as a reference to her own history, and her father’s occupation as a printer.   Her figurative work has used imagery of costume-play and ‘dressing up’ to create ambiguous, sinister narratives that work as metaphors for everyday, domestic situations and power struggles within relationships. Simultaneously, the works comment on changing notions of beauty and glamour.

Her current work, which has the collective title ‘1989’, is non-figurative with a greater use of collage. The ‘1989’ pieces are reflections on the themes of memory, nostalgia, the point between childhood and adulthood, the connections we form with particular places, and the sites where rites of passage into maturity are enacted.

These collages reconfigure the sketches and ephemera found in the artist’s own notebooks from that period (tickets from buses, gigs and the cinema, sweet wrappers, magazine clippings, scraps of paper with phone numbers) alongside maps and new elements. Paint obscures details, foregrounding others. These works are about the moments, the autobiographical details, that the component elements represent, but they are also about the processes whereby those memories are themselves adapted, edited and shaped into a coherent personal history. The integration of juvenilia from the artist’s sketchbooks within collages created by her adult self also works to produce a reflective commentary on her own artistic development.

Amy has recently completed a solo exhibition with Comme Ca Art at the Lowry Hotel and at the Atkinson Gallery in Southport.  She was short-listed for the Saatchi / Guardian Gallery in late 2006.

If you would like further information about Amy Russell please contact: claire.turner@commecaart.com.

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