For additional information, artist interviews, or images, please contact CPW at info@cpw.org | (845) 679-9957

I AM (RICHARD NIXON)
a video installation by Adie Russell

On view: January 12 - March 31, 2013
Opening reception and artist talk: Saturday, January 12 from 4-6pmwith artist talk at 5pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12-5pm and by appointment. Free and open to the public.

The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW)is delighted to announce its first solo exhibition of 2013 entitled I am (Richard Nixon), featuring video work by Adie Russell of Lomontville, NY. On view from January 12 – March 31, 2013, the site specific installation incorporates five videos produced over the past 6 years in which Russell inhabits iconic male figures from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s including Richard Alpert, Ingmar Bergman, Jack Kerouac, Richard Nixon, and in her most recent video, Marlon Brando. Lip-synching to recordings that have been extracted from radio and television interviews before ethereal backgrounds, Russell's uncanny performances cumulatively address the topics of creative process, perception, and reality.

Russell's attraction to these recordings is due in part to the fact that they represent historic figures whom she did not experience firsthand. Her meticulous restaging down to verbal stumbles and idiosyncratic gestures, bring together temporal spaces: the historical moment of the audio recording and the moment inhabited by herself and the viewer in the present. With existential titles derived from each video's transcript such as "All the People Dreaming" and "Most Extreme Perfect That Exists," Russell combines a playful mimicry with the precision of a watchmaker in her re-constructed dialogues. The exchange between these moments exists as a composite of past and present, a kind of third space where meanings shift, judgments waver, visual cues are displaced, and the language hovers, unattached to the identity of the original speaker, and yet not quite able to attach to the artist's identity, image, mouth, and gestures. Ultimately an eerie sincerity emerges from Russell's performances, one that confounds our expectations through the guise of artifice and elevates the profundity of the words spoken. Presented on a range of media interfaces including video projection and video monitors, placed throughout the gallery, the disjointed non-linear installation designed by Russell and CPW is intended to encourage active viewer engagement and further enhance the (dis)associative qualities of Russell's work.

Russell will be giving an informal artist talk at 5pm on the day of the opening of the exhibition, January 12, 2013.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1971, Adie Russell a multi-media artist who works in photography, video, performance, drawing, and painting, was raised in Europe and the United States. She holds a BA from the Eugene Lang College and a BFA from the Parsons School of Art & Design both at the New School for Social Research. Russell has exhibited regularly in the United States since 2001 and in Europe where she was recently the subject of a solo exhibition entitled The Reveal at the Leeds College of Arts in Leeds, UK. Locally she exhibited at Roos Arts in Rosendale NY where she was the subject of a solo exhibition in 2011 as well as at the Kleinert/James Art Center in Woodstock and the Image Factory in Saugerties NY. Additionally she has been included in exhibitions at Open Lot in Nashville, TN, the Carriage House in Islip, NY, the Chelsea Art Museum, ZieherSmith Gallery, and with M80Collab in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, all in NYC. She has participated in Artist Residencies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, La Cipresssaia in Montagnana in Italy, at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA, and most recently at Salem Art Works. A finalist for CPW's 2010 Photographers Fellowship Fund award, Russell participated in the 2011 NYFA MARK program.

To learn more about Adie, please visit www.adierussell.com

INTERPRETIVE PROGRAMMING
CPW invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. CPW is a non-profit, artist-centered organization dedicated to supporting artists working in photography and relatedmedia.

This exhibition and its related programs have been made possible in part with funds from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, with support from Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.