ARTIST STATEMENT/BIO (CV below)
In my work, interior emotions meet the landscape we find ourselves in: the movement, the color, and the shapes represent what we hold inside, and how all that we hold inside finds its place in the outside world. My art is about belonging; it’s about questioning where we belong, not only in our immediate space, but in the existentially abstract. It’s about where you’re coming from and where you’re going to, and those moments in between, which is the moment. Sometimes we are “stuck” at that fork in the road that Frost poetically wrote about, but which road is really the one less traveled? That’s where following the line comes in.
Following line in lyrical abstraction is walking down one of those roads, as well as the chance to go back and travel many of the roads present, depending on how long you sit with the piece. Patience and savoring are important in life; they increase its quality. I still find new roads, even when I look at older works of mine. My hope is that my audience engages with my art in a similar fashion. Keep looking, keep questioning, “Where am I in space? In my environment? Where do I belong, if anywhere? Is this home? Am I at home here? How do I feel now?” These universal questions can be so intimate that only the viewer can answer them quietly through his/her own senses. They don’t even need to be asked with actual words; the shift in feeling does the asking.
By asking the viewer to "keep looking,” following a line or shape in a complex composition will make one notice that she/he is getting pulled into another direction. The tug allows him/her to discover a shape as part of another shape, as if entering into another realm. Just when you see something, you see something else, like picking up little hidden notes on a treasure hunt, and the play between foreground and background echo the illusions that are present in our lives.
This is not all haunting and dripping in angst. Capturing minds and spirits with beauty and being able to shift the way the body feels, the way you exhale, or tear up, or smile, or feel “at home” is the lure… or perhaps the elixir.
ARTIST BIO:
Randi Russo is a visual artist and musician who currently resides and works in Los Angeles. Since the age of four, Randi knew she was an artist and spent years training in painting while growing up on Long Island, NY. She studied painting at Washington University in St. Louis, followed by psychology at New York University. As a native New Yorker, she spent much of her time making a name for herself as a musician after graduating NYU. After extensive touring and releasing three albums and two EPs, Randi decided to leave NYC and venture to Chicago to pursue her first passion – painting.
After one year in Chicago, Thomas Masters Gallery offered Randi representation, alongside artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Hunt Slonem, and Art Shay. She had a solo exhibition there in January 2015 called Life Lines, and was featured in numerous group shows at several institutions, including at the Chicago Cultural Center, and galleries in Chicago, as well as in museums in other parts of Illinois.
In March of 2017, she moved to Los Angeles to further her goals, growth and development as a visual artist. In June of 2018, she had a solo show at Castelli Art Space in Los Angeles called Liminal Spaces. From then on, Randi was featured in numerous group shows, including ones with artists Alexandra Grant and Charles Arnoldi, as well as part of a light show with TZ Projects in Los Angeles. Art critic Peter Frank has said Randi’s art is, “distinctively stylized in both its pictorial logic and its painterly manner… the ambitious reach of her line and the rhythmicality of her composition bespeak the vitality of a human mind and body making something.” Many of her works are in private collections throughout the Midwest, California, New York, as well as in Latin American cities.
ARTIST CV
(click on link above to open up in new page)