as bugs in amber

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

Take it moment by moment and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.

Excerpts from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Artwork of Serrah Russell

These moments are permanent, though they often appear to be on the threshold of disappearance. We attempt to maintain an unyielding grasp, assuming that their evaporating presence in our minds indicates a fading out of reality. We cling to experiences; ones that encompass more bliss now than ever realized formerly.

Curtains breathe and fans hover, their dance casting shadows on maps drawn into splitting ceilings. The faucet drips in rhythm into the porcelain sink and you are lying in bed, stiller than the house itself, close to a lover yet possibly further than ever. Nothing is special, none of this is extraordinary.

Still it will be kept.

Each action, even in its banality, is confined for eternity, not by its own free will but by the nature of time. And here we are now, in this time and it is not as if we have travelled away from that moment in bed, for even if we tried we could not. You stay, on that bed, in that house, listening to the faucet, watching the domestic dance, feeling the hot steady breath of the one beside you.

These images are not to remind you of a better time and they are not to recreate an old experience. They are here as bugs in amber, small and ordinary yet captured against their will. They remain, and yet simultaneously are being born, flying, eating, dying, crawling, and building. And they are here as we are: eternally, permanently given significance, simply by their existence.

My current work has been influenced by the photo album. Found photo albums, whether wedding, snapshot, or family themed contain a potential for the future along with referencing an absence of the past. I am interested in the way that common perceptions of what a photo should be, what an album should be, influence our understanding of the world. By taking found imagery, removing it from its traditional and expected location, I attempt to point towards a truth that exists in the fictional, in the constructed. As the strange and abnormal blends with the sentimental and tragic, I feel that one comes to a greater understanding of living.

Influenced by surroundings and by the touch that remains within objects and found materials, I am able to create work where the outcome is unpredictable, a surprise even to myself. My collage work deals with the idea of the eternality of actions. Each object has been affected in some way by others, whether picked up, held, cherished, crushed, or simply created and the actions placed upon it continue into the future. Similarly, as I make decisions to cut, choices to paste, to separate, to merge together, I must act upon the prior actions made and constantly move forward, as each cut becomes permanent and essential to the next action. I am fascinated with this constant movement forward that is significant to our living in this unalterable arc of time. The collages can be redone, cut again, moved some place else but the cut remains. Our only choice is to react to past reactions, to alter alterations.

These reactions result in a non-specific story, one that encompasses others actions as well as my own. Just as an album is not the story of one individual but the story of lives, intertwined. I believe that these found albums in their emptiness contain an absence that allows for the imagination of the viewer to create their own narrative, to imaginatively act upon the actions and decisions of those before them.