Shift Announces Photography Exhibition by Bailey Russel                 

Possession

February 4 – 27, 2010    

First Thursday Opening Reception: February 4^th     5-8pm

Shift Hours: Friday & Saturday 12-5 Or by Appointment: info@shiftstudio.org

"Possession" began as a response to the amazing beauty of Acadia National Park in Maine, as a way to approach the surroundings.  Taking the smallest objects, flower petals, and then decaying, scanning, and printing them at immense sizes dwarfed their real identity.  The project began as a process, a series of actions taken to adjust to the environment and change its scale to suit me more comfortably.

The peculiar inspiration was the actions of the Judge from Cormac McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian".  While traveling through the Southwest this hairless stand-in for the Devil routinely collects ancient artifacts, sketches them and destroys them saying his goal is to expunge them from the memory of mankind and posses them.  The objects collected here are natural and moving forward on their own way out of our memory.  The scans then are a different way to posses them, to record and glorify their place in time.

Bailey began studying photography as an undergraduate at Princeton before continuing for a Masters at NYU.  After spending six years working and showing in New York City he recently relocated to Seattle has begun exploring the possibilities of the Pacific Northwest.  In New York, Bailey's work has been featured in shows at the International Center for Photography, Gallery Satori, Sarah Bowen Gallery, and the Rosenberg Gallery among other places and his most recent solo show was at Gallery Cortona in Clinton, Iowa.  In addition to Shift, Bailey currently has a solo show at The Monarch Gallery in Seattle. 

For more information about the artist, please visit www.baileyrussel.com