The gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of three major works by Christopher Russell for the permanent collection of The Honolulu Art Museum.
Founded in 1927, the Honolulu Museum of Art is Hawai‘i’s largest private presenter of visual arts programs, with an internationally recognized collection of more than 50,000 works spanning 5,000 years. In addition to the visual arts, film and concert programs, lectures, art classes and workshops make the museum the state’s cultural hub.
Dealing less with the supernatural than the psychosomatic, Christopher Russell rouses ghosts. Within his scratched photographs, fractured glass panes, and hazy metallic paints, there are haunting recollections – the kind of outlier memories that plague our psyche well after childhood. Through a purposefully repressive fog, we habitually revisit the monsters of our innermost mentality, and find ourselves the protagonist of a lifelong plight – a cinematic tale evocatively illustrated by Russell’s eerie ships and spectral trees. Like a folkloric odyssey into a cognitive web, his mixed-media works and installations traipse through places of fragility and wistfulness; evidence of the divine and unsettling encounters inherent to our complex mortality.
