Russell Prather: Lost In Space

Pictured: Crust Mantle Core and Rope Installation

March 10th - April 5th

Lecture March 20th 3 pm
Reception: March 20th 4-6 pm

Russell Prather , born and raised in the Canadian Rockies and now based in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, makes work that interrogate the material and metaphorical nature of transparent painted and layered surfaces. His pieces, hanging fr0m the ceiling or rising up from the floor are visually volatile; aiming to confound categorization-as whole or fragmentary, spatial or temporal, abstract or concrete, even as painting or sculpture- they seek liberating forms of contradiction, complexity and uncertainty.

Artist Statement

My work has gone through some changes over the years, but the connecting thread—as the pieces I’ve selected for Lost in Space demonstrate—is my longstanding fascination with transparency and the layering it makes possible, which interest me both materially and metaphorically.

I started out as an artist using watercolors and acrylics to overlay washes of paint on paper. But eventually, inspired by a cel animation technique I’d used to make some short films, my layers started to separate. I began making paintings from layers of glass, then from more durable Plexiglas. Though these paintings still hung on the wall, the more layers I added, the more three-dimensional they became—as though inching away from that wall.  The four paintings that make up the A Year on the Frontier tetraptych, included in this show, are examples of this kind of work, which seems to straddle a line between painting and sculpture.   

As I continued working, I found myself wanting to incorporate more and more layers into my pieces. Since Plexi gets so much heavier and hazier the more layers you add, I turned to a lightweight transparent polyester film called DuraLar, which resembles the clear acetate cels I used for my animations.  Soon my pieces had liberated themselves from the wall altogether: now I could deploy up to 50 sheets, either suspending them on metal rods from the ceiling, or stacking them on the floor between aluminum screen frames.

These serial structures, evoking time-based forms like literature and film, reflect my critical reevaluation of the representational and narrative elements in works like A Year on the Frontier.  And they confront what I see as a persistent problem in painting: a disconnect between form and content. Attempting to dissolve this dualistic discrepancy, these new pieces integrate figurative content into their physical structure by aligning the transparent layers in a row: a sequence of surfaces you read—like words in a sentence or pages of a book—to apprehend whatever object (an egg for example, or a length of rope, etc.) they collectively conjure. In this way the illusion of depth in a representational painting becomes literal depth, and the stories these pieces tell are of their own composition—their own bodies.

At the outset of the pandemic, when so many of us questioned how we lived and worked, I again reassessed the work I was making.  In open space, viewable from multiple angles, the alignment of the layers in the aforementioned pieces remains in flux, as viewers try to “read” the succession of sheets.  Though this visual volatility seemed to produce a pleasing kind of interactive spectacle, I began to wonder whether this wasn’t also overpowering other aspects of the work—whether the spectacle, in other words, was obscuring the substance.  These doubts left me wanting to understand my own creative practice—and Painting itself—better. 

If a thing’s potential to act in the world depends on its bodily powers and limits, the potential of a painting likewise inheres in its physical constitution. Acting on this premise, I stripped my paintings down to a single sheet, and was struck by something pretty obvious: their double-sidedness—a characteristic peculiar to very thin objects, but in the case of canvas, paper and other painting supports not something we think much about, since the backsides of most paintings face a wall, remaining hidden from us.

Many of the two-sided pieces I was subsequently inspired to make—I call them “recto-verso” (R-V) paintings to avoid privileging a “front” over a “back”—are complexly patterned, garishly colored, and incorporate both opaque elements that separate the two sides and transparent ones like windows that link them. To disrupt the surface patterns I also cut out a large symmetrical silhouette of an ordinary object from the piece and flip it, so that this same shape appears, reversed, on both faces.  My intent in creating these R-V paintings is to produce a dynamic interaction between recto and verso: a sensual, if sometimes subtle, play of identity and difference.  There are two such works in the SVSU gallery:  Door/Window and Can. 

In the aftermath of the pandemic, feeling worn down by continual cultural, political, and racial conflict, I found myself making entirely opaque R-V paintings. Amid compounding crises thought naturally veers toward the existential and reductive. Accordingly, the “Black and White World” paintings I started making, though still on single sheets with a central reversed shape, eliminate those transparent passages connecting recto and verso. Hung in open space, opaque and colorless, they are more like walls than windows.  Though considering their content—each depicts one of Hermann Rorschach’s original ink blots—they are really more like mirrors: empty signifiers refusing representation, deferring instead to viewers’ existing ideations. What remains are opposing versions of the same diminished reality: one black-on-white, the other white-on-black. No grey areas. We see what we are already inclined to see and what only seems to matter, literally and figuratively, is which side you are on.

As turmoil in the US and beyond has persisted, I’ve continued making fully opaque R-V paintings that share something of the cynical, somewhat despairing spirit of those original Black and White World paintings; two of these, both featuring silhouettes of cookie jars, are included in Lost in Space—Clown Cookie Jar and Rabbit Cookie Jar. 

Other recent R-V paintings in the show are driven more by curiosity and experimentation.   In Tissue for example I test just how much can be accomplished with only two sides to layer, by rendering a fully transparent cluster of cell-like forms—as teeming, fleshy and thick as I could make them.  I consider new ways of organizing and layering surfaces in works (Partitions 1 and 2, Abiogenesis, and the four paintings from my Annihilation series) from an on-going project called “Proofs Without Words” inspired by conversations with a mathematician friend, Dan Rowe. (Because these works are entirely transparent or translucent, and thus look precisely the same from either side, I have reverted to a more traditional way of presenting them—with framing hardware hung on the wall.)  I try out a new material and a new method of presentation in Obverse, or, ‘Transparent Things through Which the Past Shines’; this piece is made from blister packs (the thermoformed packaging smallish consumer items come encased in which, despite being garbage, still sparkles like crystal!), and is displayed using a prefabricated garment rack as both hanging and framing device.   

As I continue to make new work, I find myself reflecting more and more on the metaphoric resonances of the transparent things I use to make my art, and their resemblance to other kinds of objects such as windows, stained glass, microscope slides, medical imaging, shower curtains, and textiles.  In all this I try to work in conceptually and formally rigorous and evocative ways and, as ever, to let my meanings merge with my materials.

New work: Recto and Verso