Santa Fe Reporter
Fight Numbness with Art (SFR Picks), Charlotte Jusinski, April 10, 2008
 
Albuquerque Journal North
ʻLost & Found' Reaches Deep to Give Presence to Those Who Otherwise Might
Be Invisible, Hollis Walker, October 19, 2007 
 
THE Magazine
24 HRS @ ART Santa Fe, Kathryn M. Davis, September 2007
 
Art Forum: Contemporary Issues in Art and Architecture
Interview, Santa Ana College, Spring 2005
 
Art Week
“Kim Russo at the LA Artcore Brewery Annex”, David DiMichele, May 2001
 
The Irish Times
“Dot Warner in the pub with Kim Russo, artist in residence at Spraoi 99”, Dot
Warner, August 1999


 

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...from Buddhist parable to a metaphor for our political/economic/social/personal situations...I am already mulling over contexts within which to show the drawing [House on Fire: Two Squirrels].

-Laura Addison, Curator of Contemporary Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, on the addition of House on Fire: Two Squirrels to the permanent collection, July 2009

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    Also at CCA, Russo's exhibition, The Beauty of It All, is in the Spector Ripps Project Space. One of two large-scale works in the exhibition, "A Terrible Wreck (and a field of fat horses)" depicts just that-the aftermath of a train wreck and some nearby horses grazing contentedly. Throughout the exhibition, Russo takes careful aim at a frozen moment when the audience knows a violent action has occurred, but is in suspense about how inertia, gravity and motive will respond in the next frame. The artist leaves us hanging, not only in concept, but with a careful malange of watercolor and graphite that modulates a balance between intimate and universal symbologies.

    Using a lexicon of cartoon monumentalism and relics of political, personal and industrial disaster, Russo dissects perceptions of experience to that singular moment, after action and before judgment, when all scenarios are possible and morality has yet to settle. Her compositions are sometimes frustratingly literal, and her use of objects so intimate as to be in-jokes can be confounding. In the end it is Russo's refusal to pander that compels the viewer. She leaves this car looking like a ridiculous cartoon; she makes a succession of clumsy images like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; she offers no clue as to why there is a pretty purse next to a dead goat and she is entirely justified.

-- Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter, April 2008

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ABQ Journal North

Friday, April 25, 2008

Kim Russo's Artwork Pairs Tragedy and Whimsy Along With Watercolor and Graphite

By Hollis Walker
For the Journal

    If aliens are watching CNN, they can sum up our world in one (English) word: Disaster. Ours is a world of plane crashes, hurricanes, boys with machine guns, one wretched tragedy after another. Viewers watch endless replays of the coverage, vicariously suffering along with those directly affected.

    But what if there was something to see in those pictures besides the attendant human suffering— a moment of beauty, a bit of irony, a spiritual memo from a higher power? And what about the turning point these disasters represent— the moment at which everything changes, after which nothing will ever be the same again? How do we move forward again?

    Kim Russo, chairwoman of the College of Santa Fe art department, has been pursuing those questions of late in very small to very large graphite and watercolor paintings of disasters. But Russo's sinking ships, crashing cars, wrecking trains, falling airplanes and burning buildings are set in surreal, unpopulated environments, as if the victims had experienced a biblical rapture and been whisked away just before the turning point. Yet each of Russo's calamities has its witness, characters so ludicrous their mere presence declares these images allegorical, not documentary.

    The witness in "A Capsized Ship" is a cartoonlike figure in a yellow-and-red chicken suit. He stands on the dock, curiously indifferent to the events taking place in the water. A three-deck ship is sinking, though still tethered tenuously to land by a fraying rope. But the ship hasn't merely capsized; it appears to be shape-shifting, melting into the water. Mr. Chicken stands framed by an archway to nowhere. A city skyline rises in the background.

    (Could this be your life? At times, mine has certainly felt like this: Everything seems to be fine— the ship is tied up to the dock— but as Annie Lennox once crooned, "this boat is sinking." And the one guy around who might lend a hand is wearing a chicken suit and not paying attention. Go figure. Certainly this interpretation is not what Russo had in mind, but hey, that's the risk an artist takes.)

    In "A Terrible Wreck," at 14 feet long Russo's largest piece in the exhibit, the viewer looks down a set of train tracks at the end of which is a wreck. A passenger car and many freight cars have jumped the tracks, landing in a violent jumble together. But placidly grazing in a bright green meadow next to the track are four horses, oblivious to the crash. Likewise, an unscathed engine awaits a hookup at the right side of the picture plane. The converging of the tracks is about perspective, of course, and marks that turning point Russo is contemplating, challenging our assumption that this moment can only be experienced as tragic. The horses in their bucolic setting remind us that life goes on, beauty persists, and this too shall pass.

    Russo's "Plane Crash" is reminiscent of United Flight 93's demise outside of Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001. Who can forget the visual dissonance of that beautiful verdant field and the broken plane? Here, the plane is but a burning shell, smoke obscuring any background; once again no people are pictured. But in the sky flies a hot-air balloon in the shape of the controversial British black-faced fictional character, the ever-smiling Golliwog. One can't help but think of the reports of those who in reality witness disasters, their wildly differing accounts and sometimes ridiculous claims of what they saw. ("I swear, officer, there was a Golliwog in the air!") The larger questions seem to be which gives greater offense: the plane crash or the racist caricature?

    "Portrait of a Chihuahua in a Pink Hoody" offers welcome humorous respite. The Chihuahua in question wears a pink outfit complete with fluffy white hood. She sits under a folding table on top of which sits a folded American flag; her limpid brown eyes gaze directly at the viewer. The setting is behind the backstop of a baseball diamond on school property; smoke billows from the building in the background. Russo has carefully painted the chain link fence separating the viewer from the school, reminding us that our perceptions of any event are altered by obstacles real and imagined. If only Chihuahuas could talk.

    In "Chihuahua" as in all the works in this exhibit, Russo gives the viewer options for engagement. Chihuahua or burning school? Chicken or sinking ship? Golliwog or burning plane? Her painting technique also echoes this dualistic feel, carefully illustrative in some respects, watery and blotchy in others. Some pieces are mostly drawn and partly painted; others are the opposite. Some areas are painstakingly articulated, as the chain-link fence; other areas, including the schoolyard, are left completely empty.

    All these pieces are as baffling as a Zen koan, the type of paradox presented by a Buddhist teacher to his pupils to demonstrate that truth cannot always be found in reason. Once the pupils discover that there is no answer to questions such as, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" they are freed from their intellectual chains and headed for enlightenment— and, of course, the beauty of it all.