Somebodies | Russ White

Portraiture is an act of protracted observation; it provides an excuse to stare. The longer and the closer you look, the more a body will break down into its component parts: tone, texture, form, and line. In a new series of large scale drawings on canvas, artist (and MPLSART Senior Editor) Russ White uses portraiture and figure study for material exploration, collaging bodies even further into abstracted sections of saturated color, spontaneous mark-making, and rigorous photorealism.

Combining these ways of seeing into energetically dynamic pictures is an attempt to visualize the complimentarities of our lives: that we are apart from the world but a part of it; that we can know many people but never know what it is to be them; and that we are each individually finite, flawed, and inconsequential — ants in a supremely dysfunctional hill — but at the same time part of an endless, marvelous continuum.

Gallery Hours: 

Mon. – Sat. 9:30 a.m. – 9:30 p.m. 

Sun. 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.