Rachel Jessen & Chris Russo
Each with a different approach, Rachel Jessen and Chris Russo adjust to how they see space, objects and architecture in this time of quarantine.
Rachel Jessen
Chris Russo
Tell me a little bit about yourself?
RJ: I’m Rachel! I’m struggling with what to put here. I love ranch dressing and wrestling. I sometimes get paid to make photos, but mostly I do other things to support photo-making.
CR: Hello, I'm Chris Russo. I'm not a photographer by trade, but I'm in the world of visual arts. My mom was an art director for an advertising agency and my dad is a photographer. So I basically grew up with a camera in my face. I work in post-production for commercials doing compositing, color grading, and motion graphics. Initially, I got into photography about 10 years ago to help train my eye and develop my skills. This quickly became an obsession, and for better or worse, is a part of me now.
Can you tell me a little bit about how your individual series began?
RJ: Luckily, I’ve had a big box of Polaroid film sitting around since my birthday in December. It seemed too precious to use on just anything, so I was waiting for the right time to use it. Then this global pandemic rolls around and I find myself needing to have some type of creative outlet. Having to stay at home meant turning my attention towards things—objects, corners, shelves, arrangements—around the house.
CR: Last year I decided to challenge myself and create an image a day for one year. I posted them on Instagram mainly because I thought it was a pretty good way to hold myself accountable and finish the project. I learned a lot in the process and these are a few that I'm proud of for various reasons. I also included a few since the project finished and quarantine began.
Both of your individual series has an interesting relationship to objects and architecture. With the photos often devoid of human subjects the objects and architecture often take on a human figure. What draws you to these isolated places?
RJ: As I said above, I felt I had no choice but to make images of things. My regular practice is rooted in documentary/photojournalism, and in making photos I'm generally interacting with people, so that clearly can’t happen anymore. This process has felt like a move from the outside to the inside—literally and figuratively. I’m feeling compelled to noticing the things that exist around me that I usually take for granted.
CR: I try not to stick to a specific genre of photography. I'll do landscapes, architecture, interiors, I wouldn't say I'm averse to taking photos of people, but I guess when I do it's either someone I know or street photography that's almost voyeuristic. I think I'm drawn to scenes that are unnaturally pristine. I like my work to be incredibly clean and graphic. Sometimes I'll go as far as painting out people or objects or anything that distracts from the focus of the image. I'm probably OCD, but there's something I find very satisfying about removing all the flaws.
Can you talk about your use of light? Chris, your photos use light to hide and illuminate. It seems as though you look to light to dictate your photo. Rachel, your photos are all shot in interior spaces. What is your relationship to light, or lack thereof?
RJ: I wish I had a thoughtful answer for this, but the only consideration I’m giving to light is whether there's enough of it. The Polaroid stocks I’m using are rated at 600 ISO (or something like that) and are a bit finicky. On one hand, I’m needing to think more about light and on the other, I’m leaving a lot up to chance.
CR: Photography for me is very technical. When I'm out there taking photos, I'm thinking about the whole process end to end. This is mostly because I come from the world of post-production and we like to have a plan of attack. I'm not only thinking about the composition, but I'm also looking for interesting pockets of light, I'm looking for shapes to help add depth, I'm looking for texture, and I'm considering how this is going to push the image in the editing process. Taking the picture is only the first half of the process for me. I like to take my time in Lightroom and Photoshop, I think that might be where I find the most joy. I'm not afraid to let the shadows fall off into obscurity or let the negative space do all the talking.
How has your photography practice changed since quarantine?
RJ: See above :) At this point in the quarantine, while I’m still making some Polaroids, I’ve gotten tired of my house, which is reflected in the fact that I’m not creating as many images in this series as I was at the start. I have turned towards processing 35mm film at home with a monobath (I’m starting a series playing with layering pixels & grain), and I’m working up the courage to do some Polaroid lifts.
CR: I've actually had a good deal more time to take pictures since the lockdown. In between freelance gigs I've been trying to put together a book of the series and I've been taking photo walks/bike rides around the neighborhood. Documenting the vegetation and cars of Santa Monica has been my main focus. There are some very unique plants and an eccentric car culture out here in California. So the lockdown has helped me examine things a bit closer to home.
Rachel Jessen is a photographer and lover of wrestling.
Chris Russo is a photographer and digital artist.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Ms. Betsy’s Curry Chicken Divan
3 or 4 skinless chicken breast halves
1 T olive oil
1 lemon
Salt, Pepper and Lawry’s
2 14 oz bags of baby florets frozen broccoli – use 1 ½ bags (20 ounces) – frozen works best
1 can of cream of chicken soup
2/3 c. mayonnaise (Hellmann’s)
½ c. evaporated milk
½ c. cheddar cheese grated
1 t. or more of lemon juice (I use the juice from the baked chicken – about 1 T.)
½ t. curry powder
1 T. melted butter
½ c. dried seasoned breadcrumbs
AT 2 hours at least before serving cook Chicken (this can be done anytime earlier)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees
Place olive oil in a glass baking dish. Place chicken breast in dish, coating each with side with oil. Squeeze juice of ½ the lemon over all. Season with salt, pepper and Lawry’s. Slice the rest of the lemon and place a lemon slice on top of each chicken piece. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes.
Remove from oven and cool. When cool cut up chicken or break up into bite size pieces.
Steam Broccoli (about 20 ounces) per directions until almost tender.
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Use a 9 x 12 baking dish and spray lightly with oil or cooking spray. Arrange broccoli, then chicken pieces.
In a bowl mix chicken soup, mayonnaise, evaporated milk, cheese, lemon and curry powder. Pour mixture over the chicken.
Mix butter with bread crumbs and sprinkle over the sauce.
Bake for 35 minutes or until heated. Makes 6 servings.
The Wilderness / joy tirade
The Wilderness
The Wilderness (2017) by joy tirade. Single-channel video 4:03 minutes
“The Wilderness is a meditation on the relationship of place to human emotion. As we revisit a site, our standing memory becomes scripted with new memory, in this view a site can become a depository of stray feelings that accumulate but simultaneously dissipate.”
Can you tell me a little bit about how this film originated?
jt: This film, The Wilderness, is filmed in rural Virginia off Highway 85. This area of the country holds a lot of meaning for me. It’s like a time capsule. I moved to rural Virginia when I was a young person to live with my grandparents. Before then I had only lived in very large cities like Buffalo, NY. I remember my first impression of the region as being wild, lush, overgrown with trees and brush, and teaming with sounds and smells. Some places had old buildings overgrown with kudzu vines which appeared to pull apart old boards and return the buildings to the earth. The night sky was so bright with stars it would make me ache while I stared up at it. The noises of the region are loud with birds and cicadas. The air in the summer smells of that metallic screen-door smell you sense right before a storm. This is the place, this county, is the location where I came of age, where I first found love and also lost love. When I returned to this region almost a decade later I found the memories there waiting for me like in the soil, in the trees, in the foliage and the rain. The Wilderness, for me, contains all of these meditations.
Can you talk about the sound image relationship? I know that they were recorded at intentionally different times.
jt: This is a great question. In some of my other works I am using more than one channel of video and this allows me to open up the narrative to alternative constructions of narrative. I am interested in non linear time and telling stories that are snippets of stories which recur endlessly. Sound in The Wilderness is another way I am playing with the construct of time and narrative. I also experiment with in-camera alterations and play with ways of manipulating the light entering the camera.
I shoot with the camera on silent and for this film the sound is from a field recording made one year prior. For The Wilderness this creates a disconnect between actual time and perceived time. This is me trying to understand perception. How we can’t actually know space but can only experience it through our perception. Everything we experience is filtered and potentially altered by our faculties of perception. There is a slight timing disconnect with the sound and with the imagery at times. I think it is faintly disorienting too for the viewer.
You're trained as a painter. Your films have a very painterly feel to them with their attention to layering, texture, color. How does painting play a role, if any, in your video work?
jt: Great question! This relates to your above question about sound. In this work I am thinking about the material and textural qualities of sound and how these qualities relate to the meaning of the work. I think this urge comes from my background as a painter. If you use a material in contemporary painting like rose-water it carries a meaning. The medium cannot be separated from its material implications. So too sound from field recording made one year prior to the video has its own meaning. These are two discrete moments made to seem as one by the video. One thing this does for me is highlight our finite experience as humans in a geographical setting that is as old as time itself. I am thinking about this contrast of time and our place in time-space.
The layering of the images immediately evokes a sense of memory or even longing. Then there's a beautifully subtle moment where the image begins to transform into fluorescent hues. Can you tell me a little about these choices?
jt: I am interested in time’s relationship to the body and to memory. I am interested in the relationship between time and longing. I am interested in raising questions about knowledge and self knowledge. How we know what we know about ourselves or about the people we love. How is all of this complicated by technology. All of these considerations play out in my work in different ways.
I have been thinking lately about how slate forms in sheets under rivers and compounded by the slow march of time. How natural elements are formed by accumulation, pressure, and time. About how this kind of geological time is distinct from our more fragile human time. These layers build up year after year until they are transformed. I think of layering in this particular video as mimicking this natural process.
In the middle of the film, there is the introduction of a piece of cloth. Sequenced and majestic. The only article in the film that is not nature made. Because of this, for me, it carries the weight of a subject or the artifacts of a subject that is no longer present.
jt: In conversations with you, Colleen, I first learned of the work of Nathaniel Dorsky. I became very inspired by his work and I bought his book of lectures called Devotional Cinema. I am drawn to this quote by him for this video work. He writes: “In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.” In my video work I am trying to implicate the body without the use of the body.
In many of my works, especially the larger full-sized projections, the viewer is the one who begins to feel present in the space I am depicting. There are no actors and no visible human bodies present in my works. My videos implicate the body without having an actor, because I am trying to recreate a simulation of sensuality, the sense of being right there. I want the viewer to enter my feelings, or maybe even think that the work is about their own life. The imagery becomes like a dream or a memory for the viewer.
This film was made in 2017. Looking at it now, deep in Covid19 fear, does it have a new meaning for you?
jt: This film feels full of air, moving air, light and open space. I currently don’t feel safe in open air even in a mask due to the Covid-19 fears. The film doesn’t take on new meaning but viewing it again I do feel altered by our current situation. Perhaps I feel altered too by what I am viewing during Quarantine. I have been watching the show Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This has made me rethink this work a little bit too.
Thank you for the opportunity to interview with you! If the reader would like more information I can be reached through my website www.joytirade.com or through Instagram @joytirade
“My practice operates at the nexus of experimental video, abstract painting, light installation, and zine making. In my work and in my research I create connections between phenomenology, technology, and feminist theory to explore the metaphysics of human emotion such as love and longing. “
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
“SO EASY” Chicken and Swiss Casserole
Ok, I’m not promising any healthy recipes over here. If you’re gonna do the midwest casserole right, you’re gonna have to give up your quarantine diet for the night. Another gem from my mom’s church cookbook. Chris promises it’s “SO EASY”. Layer the midwest staples - meat, cheese, and canned soup. Search for sports reruns on TV. An hour later voila! Bon appetit!
From Mom’s Church Cookbook
Salima Al-Ismaili
Salima Al-Ismaili's work explores the spaces of spirituality and dreams. She has shared with us her newest embroidery on canvas.
In addition to the final piece, she gives us a glimpse into her daydreams through her daily sketches.
Untitled by Salima Al-Ismaili (Oman), 2020 - Embroidery on Canvas
“I often dislike afternoons because I end up napping. Besides rested, I tend to wake up feeling lethargic and nauseous. Before getting up, I will sometimes recall a moment and realize that I was most probably being lied to at the time. I grew up thinking that dreams conjured during the day time were the work of the devil. So perhaps whatever lingering after taste was probably the same.
I work for THE MAN, so doing little drawings and doodles feel like a luxury. I enjoyed transferring the drawing style onto canvas by embroidering. This was a particularly fun and freeing experiment. I'm looking forward to stabbing more colorful holes.”
Salima Al-Ismaili
Sketches by Salima Al-Ismaili (Oman), 2020 - Ink on Paper
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Apple Crisp
Ok, fine! It’s not a casserole but it’s baked in one dish and I make the rules so it counts. This apple crisp recipe is a Pesci favorite. Straight from my mom’s 1990 church cookbook, this recipe hails from a one-room schoolhouse in Miles, Iowa and was the winner of the 1965 Indiana State Fair Apple Judging Day. Double the crust (a must!), eat piping hot with vanilla bean ice cream or cold in the morning with coffee. You can’t go wrong.
From Mom’s church cookbook
Welcome to The Casserole Series!
Here's what The Casserole Series looked like: Over the last year, on programmed Sundays, I made casseroles and kept an unlocked door. I invited artists and friends to gather in my apartment. A featured artist showed their work to an audience strewn across my bedroom floor. The series hosted video installations, sound artists, printmakers, poets, and dancers. Often, their work was a personal experiment, testing the boundaries of both new and familiar mediums. And of course, we ate casserole. Nothing too fancy. Just midwest's finest served on mismatched dinnerware.
In the wake of the global pandemic, The Casserole Series is now moving online. Every Sunday a different artist will be featured on the site. We have artists working in embroidery, poetry, performance, dance, and video lined up. These Sunday shows will often include a live artist talk, Q&A, reading or performance. Keep a lookout for times and links so that you can attend! And of course, there will always be a casserole recipe -- you'll just have to make it yourself.
The first show is this Sunday, April 19th. Salima Al-Ismaili will invite us into a place of dreams through her embroidery and sketches. See details for Salima Al-Ismaili's show and upcoming events here.
I miss crowded apartments. I miss feeding friends and strangers. I miss the possibility of becoming friends with strangers. I miss you.
But for now, in this digital space, I am so happy you are here.