MEN IN CITIES

Jim russell

Gouache on ink jet print. 44"x26"

Gouache on ink jet print. 44"x90"

Gouache on ink jet print. 44"x90"

Gouache on ink jet print. 44"x88"

This is what these large images look like up close, they vibrate between the surface and the background.

My creative strategy for Men in Cities seeks to celebrate and critique the power of twentieth-century Canadian modernism by mediating images of a striving male subject from that period in a way that acknowledges the problems of progress while providing a hopeful way forward through a newly constructed, rematerialized human spirit.

Gouache on ink jet print. 22"x44"

Gouache on ink jet print. 30"x44"

Gouache on ink jet print. 20"x44"

The combination of printmaking, photography and painting techniques I used for Men in Cities are meant to reveal the contradictory forces contained within modernism in a way that creates tension materially and conceptually.

Gouache on ink jet print. 20"x44"

Men in Cities

Men in Cities imagines modern bodies in a state of ecstatic exorcism, resigned to human struggle, deeply engaged in the material transition of the body and mind, energetically vibrating with faith in a different kind of progress, with new forms always taking shape.

Gouache on ink jet print. 44"x26"

Please note these paintings are very different in person, because some are quite large, and you can the work much more clearly on the surface.

Gouache on ink jet print. 18"x44"

Gouache on ink jet print. 44"x27"