Serrah Russell and Maggie Carson Romano

Pacific Motel

December 05 – 29, 2012
Reception / Thursday, December 06, 6–8pm

Serrah Russell and Maggie Carson Romano began this collaboration by assembling their common interests and embarking on a trip to a roadside motel for the weekend. Once there, they commenced explorations of the interiors and exteriors of their shared space. Intertwining their approaches to memory and experience, together they gathered source material for works each would make upon return to their respective cities of Seattle and New York.

In Pacific Motel, their individual works surface together in an intricate cluster of remnants. The material they gathered echoes back and forth in collages of recalled experiences taking form in object, image, space and sound. Their motel room is recalled through varied reconstructions that seek comfort through heightened sterility. Meanwhile, natural elements mimicked within their room persistently exert their presence in quietly intrusive ways. Emergent loss, contained growth, inversion and erasure are all at play within this duet where nothing is truly as it seems. 

As part of Pacific Motel, the artists have published a limited edition collection of their photographic materials that will be on view and available for purchase at SOIL.

SERRAH RUSSELL BIO: 
Serrah Russell uses instant film, photography and digital imagery to illuminate the permanent effect that actions trace upon objects within their environment. Her works are a tangible remnant of an abstracted and often autobiographical narrative of immutable occurrences that move forward in a flux of nature, culture and time. Juxtaposition of seemingly disparate imagery allows shrouded parallels to emerge within her pairings. A graduate from the University of Washington with a BFA in Photography, Russell has exhibited widely in Seattle and is co-founder and curator of Violet Strays; an online curatorial project emphasizing temporality with an aim to forge connections between artists by way of the internet. She currently lives and works in Seattle, WA. 

MAGGIE CARSON ROMANO BIO:
Maggie Carson Romano combines photography, video and installation in query of the physicality of memory and its intrinsic connection to sensitivity and response. In her work she pulls single elements from context to express both their strength and vulnerability. Emergent randomness powers her fleeting installations, each of which are sensitive to variables that lie beyond control. The systematic responses embedded in these works yield accumulations and dispersions that become physical records of each work through time and space. She studied fine art at the University of Southern California, earned her MFA at the University of Washington and currently lives & works in New York.