Cozette Russell

Born 1978, Exeter, NH, lives in Lee, New Hampshire 

I treat the photograph as a site of revision, extending a feminist tradition that understands images as spaces of construction and intervention. My self‑portraits begin as single exposures and then move through processes of cutting, layering, projecting, and re‑photographing, mirroring the distortions of memory. Duration is one of my primary materials: I want the work to slow time, to stretch the moment of looking so that the photograph is experienced as an ongoing process rather than a fixed event. Centering hands, gesture, labor, and the everyday, my work questions where identity resides and insists on the domestic and “minor” as worthy of sustained attention.

My films and photographs have shown at various galleries and museums including SFMOMA, the Wexner Center for the Arts, NADA Curated, Harvard University, the University of New England, the University of New Hampshire, Antioch College, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, where I’m a member. 

cozetterussell@gmail.com
instagram
white columns artist registry
cv

Murmur Mother v. 1-5.1 (with hand punched braille) 2024, archival prints with hand punched braille in
wooden frames, 13.5 x 12 x 1 inches Edition of 5 + 3 AP

Image (l) Murmur Mother v. 3, 2024, framed archival print photograph with hand-punched braille (no glass) 33 x 40 x 3 inches. Edition of 2 + 2 AP
Image (r) Installation view, Murmur Mother v. 3  A.I.R. Gallery, Photo credit: Matthew Sherman

1.
stars slept over
murmur mother
mountains still
murmur mother
sun warmed rocks
murmur mother
enveloped earth
murmur mother
scrubby pinyon trees
murmur mother
vast land
murmur mother
lightness
murmur mother
rainy snowy days
murmur mother
textures of bark
murmur mother
2.
soft peeling skin
murmur mother
double trunked birch
murmur mother
without language
murmur mother
complicated history
murmur mother
kaleidoscope tilt
murmur mother
refuge and barrier
murmur mother
water surrenders
murmur mother
tree roots rise
murmur mother
unforgiving thud
murmur mother3. 
stumble forward
murmur mother
shivers happiness
murmur mother
flapping hands
murmur mother
loose soft stones
murmur mother
labor nurses
murmur mother
stained ceiling 
murmur mother
body betrayed
murmur mother
blood rush
murmur mother
blood clot
murmur mother4. 
orchard blooms
murmur mother
feel music
murmur mother
plays no note
murmur mother
holds arms up
murmur mother
hold warmth close
murmur mother
mammals
murmur mother
lick and groom
murmur mother
sway and squeeze
murmur mother
autumn to winter
murmur mother5.
stillness listen
murmur mother
darkness creeps
murmur mother
breathe whisper
murmur mother
love grows
murmur mother
arbor of trees 
murmur mother
dragonflies swoop
murmur mother
upside down
murmur mother
all is beauty
murmur mother
shadows grow
murmur mothe

Untitled (summer studio/winter studio) 
2023, 47 x 34 x 6 inches. 
framed archival print photograph (no glass), bricks, and twine
Edition of 2 + 2 AP

“Letters occupy an anticipatory temporality. The letter writer extrapolates the future of their recipient, looking ahead from a present that is already past. The letter’s uncanny entwinement of temporal frames is insistent in Cozette Russell’s Untitled (summer studio/winter studio) (2023), a photographic installation in which two stacks of two bricks support a collaged photo print. Visible in the print is an identical doubled image of a woman, blurred by motion, who appears to fall, twice, and each time to catch herself on hands and knees. Drawing on the essential latency of photography—which parallels that of the epistolary form—Russell’s work is like a hall of mirrors that divides and deepens time, reaching simultaneously into a past twice removed through layers of film and into a possibility proposed by the bricks and their gravity.“

- Nicole Kaack, Curator, “Write me letters” you write to me
A.I.R. Gallery, June 2024





                                                                                                                                                                 A.I.R. Gallery, photo credit: Matthew Sherman

Arcadia March v.1, v.2
2024, 22 x 48 x 1.5 inches.
Archival prints in wooden frame
Edition of 2 + 2 AP




                                                         Documentation at the University Of New England Gallery