Russell Hart: Untold Stories

Photographs, drawings, and animations

Untold Stories incorporates three separate but somewhat related bodies of work, two of them photographs and one of them drawings. These are Immigrant Story: Ghosts of Ellis Island, Coffers: The Pathos of Things, and Taking Shapes: Nonobjective Drawings. Immigrant Story comes from a study of the ruins of the Ellis Island Hospital Complex, to which thousands of American immigrants were dispatched for evaluation and treatment. Coffers is the continuation of a project shown a couple of years ago at McGuffey, documenting people’s sentimental items displayed in the containers in which they’ve stored them. Taking Shapes is a series of graphite drawings partly based on Russell’s photographs that employ rubbings, shadings, and lines to create a tension between representation and the nonobjective.