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

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