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
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The days become a rotation of care I surrender to––running fingers under bathwater, brushing each tooth, threading arms through sleeves, buckling his seatbelt. The years have changed, but not much of this changes. In the photographic space, we are always in the present, in an infinite loop, a space where there are no beginnings or endings. One day, I set the self-timer and enter the camera frame. My own body now plagued by illness. I become entwined with impermanence. The future is no longer a predictably approaching horizon. Each day feels unknown and unpromised.

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