DOUBLE CLEAR

E.T. RUSSIAN 

Hedreen Gallery | December 7, 2019 - March 1, 2020

High-Resolution Media Art Residency 2019

DOUBLE CLEAR is an interactive exhibition of animation, sculpture, and poetry. Follow gargoyle apparitions as they fly over cemeteries and bridges, land and water, and experience a series of surreal events. This installation is a meditation on choosing what to live for. 

On January 8, 2020, a special public program features regional artists working in sound and movement. These artists perform live in the exhibition space with DOUBLE CLEAR as the backdrop. All performers created their work from the theme of "choosing what you’re living for." This event features Rana San, Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco, Seema Bahl, Wynne Greenwood, and Claire Barrera as well as storytelling and poetry by Anne Riley, Jaye Sablan, and LL Gimeno. 

In the Artist's Words

I’ve made a lot of documentary work in the past (comics and film), but DOUBLE CLEAR isn’t linear like that. It’s more a visual poem about living and dying and transformation. When I was 18 I almost died in a traumatic accident and acquired artificial legs due to limb loss.

Twenty years later I am still alive and facing an unclear future, especially considering it is hard to find elders with disabilities who are role models for thriving while aging. In this era of Trump and the border wall, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, and climate change I, and many people, are asking what the goal is. What are we living for? DOUBLE CLEAR is a meditation on choosing what we’re living for, as we're aging and dying.

After 20+ years of making zines and comics, while simultaneously exploring the cultural aspects of disability and chronic illness I became interested in the intersection: multi-sensory art. I thought how do people who are blind, Deaf or neurodivergent access art? I wanted my comic books to reach a wider audience, not just people who read comics, but who watch videos, listen to sounds, like to touch things and move their bodies. How can I create work that stimulates multiple senses at once? I’m very interested in things that are low, horizontal and forgotten. I use a wheelchair and crawl a lot. I love broken things and what comes when broken things make new things.

DOUBLE CLEAR will stimulate people audibly, visually, spatially and through touch. Working with Seattle University and The Hedreen Gallery, offers me the resources of recording, editing and exhibition space, as well as access inclusion (ASL interpreters, live captioning, audio description, braille printing, wheelchair access, etc.). This is an exciting opportunity to go big with my work and evolve my grand experiment with storytelling, accessibility, and sensuality.

For DOUBLE CLEAR I have taken thousands of photographs, created hundreds of illustrations, recorded dozens of sounds and edited the results together into a large-scale animation installation. I am offering an interactive sculpture, which attendees are invited to touch. New materials I am working with are resin, gravel and concrete, as well as found objects.

I’m largely self-taught and over the years I've learned to dance, draw, interview, record sounds, make movies, publish, produce, direct and sculpt. My do-it-yourself animations I call “video comics”. Now I produce large-scale multi-sensory video comic installations.

-E.T Russian, 2019

_{E.T. Russian, DOUBLE CLEAR, installed at Hedreen Gallery. Hi-Res Media Artist in Residence 2019. Photo by Joe Freeman Jr.}

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Artist Bio

E.T Russian is a multi-sensory artist and maker of comics, zines, and videos. Russian is interested in creating accessible spaces and stories that welcome all bodies and minds into spaces where multiple senses can be stimulated. Russian’s graphic journalism is currently in the international traveling exhibit “Graphic Medicine: Ill-Conceived and Well Drawn”. Russian’s installation CASTING SHADOWS exhibited at Jack Straw New Media Gallery (2016), Youngstown Cultural Arts Center (2017) and Kittredge Gallery (2018). Their installation HELLO exhibited at Hedreen Gallery in 2018. In 2017 Russian was featured in the Out of Sight exhibition of contemporary Northwest art. Russian is the author of The Ring of Fire Anthology and has been published in a number of books and magazines including Disability in American Life, PEN Magazine, The Stranger, The Seattle Weekly, The Graphic Medicine Manifesto and Gay Genius, in addition to their mini-comics and zines. Russian is the Co-Director of the documentary Third Antenna (2001) and has received support for DOUBLE CLEAR from 4Culture, Short Run, and the University of Washington Harlan Hahn Disability Studies Award.

About the SU High-Resolution Media Art Production Residency

This experimental program seeks to support an emerging or mid-career artist who practices new media art production (photo, video, audio, film, mechatronics) and who engages with the critical and experimental use of high-resolution image and/or audio-making processes. The resident artist collaborates with students, faculty, and staff in multiple academic departments to produce original research and a solo gallery exhibition. This digital residency has been organized by Seattle U Galleries Curator Molly Mac and anchored with funding and production support from Pigott Endowment for the Arts and Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery. Seattle University Art Galleries and the Departments of Fine Art and Art History are proud to support the critical research and creative production of contemporary new media artists in collaboration with students and faculty. 

 *The banner image at the top of this page features artwork by Carol Rashawnna Williams (2019), Romson Regarde Bustillo (2019), Sanctuary City Project (2019-20), and E.T. Russian (2019-20).

Hedreen Gallery

Lee Center for the Arts (CNFA)

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