In her captivating oils, Adde Russell juxtaposes meticulous realism with arresting moments of painterly expressionism. The resulting works are complex and visually dense, with a bewitching sense of mystery that resists fixed notions of meaning.

A classically trained painter who relishes impermanence and ambiguity, Russell's monumental oil tableaus pair meticulously executed photorealism with expressionistic flourishes born from the inherent messiness of the artistic process. The resulting works feel at once gravely serious, slyly lighthearted, and captivatingly unknowable. At first glance, it's easy to mistake Russell's breathtakingly executed oil paintings for mixed media works. But a closer look reveals that the details which could read as decoupage - lines of painter's tape, mylar balloons and fringed party streamers - are in fact all meticulously rendered in paint, just like the rest of the piece. Whether intentional or not, her aptitude for realism plays a clever trick on the eye, and this proximity between expectation and reality is just one of the many surprising contradictions that makes her work so compelling, both visually and psychologically.

Russell is an intensely process-oriented artist, a fact apparent in everything from the beautifully constructed wooden frames on which she stretches her canvas (all cleverly mounted to hang several inches away from the wall), to the intentional moments of dripped, smudged, or scratched paint that give the viewer an experiential window into the process itself, and the inherent messiness that goes hand in hand with creating. The pieces of painter's tape that frequently appear in her work are another homage to the creative process, a lasting imprint of the humble material that could feel left over or accidental were it not treated with such care as to render it practically indistinguishable from the real thing.

She gives little away in terms of conceptual backing or narrative for any given piece. In refusing to pin her works down with fixed notions of meaning, she reflects not only the fluid nature of her process, but the ever changing ways that we as humans interact with and interpret art. Complex and electric with mysteries, her paintings welcome new conversations with each version of ourselves that we approach them as.