Recent Exhibitions
December 2025 Winter Salon in Black and White, Gagné Contemporary, Toronto
November 2025 Human, Solo Exhibition Assemblage Gallery, Toronto
April 2023, Men in Cities, Solo Exhibition, Gales Gallery, York University
March 2023, a juncture, a join, a strait, a pinch, Collision Gallery, Toronto
July 2022 Peinture Fraiche et Nouvelle Construction, Art Mûr, Montreal
Artist Statement 2026
Jim Russell’s paintings are as much about the viewer as they are about the visual subject matter and media. Exploring voyeurism, eroticism and complicity of the viewer, as well as the complex power of seeing and being seen, Russell draws the viewer’s attention to the nature of surveillance, real and imagined, and its relation to state power. Born in Montreal and working and living in Toronto, Russell’s black and white ink paintings are equal parts familiar and puzzling.
Russell’s research involves an ongoing process of photo selection from various still and moving sources, including film, video documentaries, the Internet, and personal photos and archives. Selected photos from the archive are often recomposed and reduced to simplified graphics in high contrast black and white. The medium dictates and defines the boundaries of expression and its possibilities with its slow, intermittent drying process.
With loaded images, the source materials often reveal the fallibility of perception. Each image is made to illuminate the viewer and to reveal the inherent weaknesses of perception, of point of view, and the conscious and unconscious jump to judgment and conclusion. The works resonate because of their incompleteness; they hang in suspension as fragmented film stills, suggesting partial narratives that can only be completed through the viewer's engagement. To do this, viewers must draw upon their own experiences to resolve the work.
This existential challenge of creating meaning is a deeply personal yet social act. Russell reveals the truth of how the mundane can be monumental. Recent work and research explores how stories and mythologies are initiated, promoted, and instrumentalized and by whom. How can we build attention around the narrative's origin point to be more aware of its elements and their manipulation? Can we share the coalescence of ideas, the moment of the creation of meaning?
Russell applies traditional Chinese ink to YUPO paper, a glossy and slick paper that acts like plastic. Its slow dry time creates unique, often unpredictable effects; the water-based media sits entirely on the surface until it evaporates, often eliminating “feathering” typical of watercolour. Russell embraces where inks move freely and can be erased or reworked completely, using a variety of techniques including graphite drawing, ink pools, rubbing, sgraffito, wiping and traditional brushstrokes. Ink pooling removes the artist's hand and introduces chance into the process. Working within the confines of an 11” x 14” paper size, Russell creates intimate studies that replicate the viewing of personal screens.
As someone who has often been cast as a mediator and peacemaker, Russell seeks to understand and celebrate the process of reconciling different stories and points of view by making image- based stories to bridge differences and share humanity. These paintings are meditations on humanness and the inherent nature of human interaction.
Education
2020 BFA, OCAD University, Toronto, ON
2023 MFA, York University, Toronto, ON
In his impressionistic black and white ink paintings on paper, Toronto-based artist Jim Russell (b. 1961) creates provocative images that ask critical questions about media, technology, gender, relationships, politics, capitalism and the truth of the image itself.
He produces images that are familiar and puzzling. Originating from common sources such as documentary and social media, personal, national and international archives, the works resonate because of their incompleteness; they hang in suspension as fragmented film stills suggesting partial narratives that can only be completed by the engagement of the viewer. To do this, viewers must draw upon their own experiences to resolve the work.
In 2023 Jim completed a major series entitled Men in Cities which seeks to celebrate and critique the power of twentieth-century Canadian modernism by mediating images of a striving male subject from that period in a way that acknowledges the problems of progress while providing a hopeful way forward through a newly constructed, rematerialized human spirit. Men in Cities imagined modern bodies in a state of ecstatic exorcism, resigned to human struggle, deeply engaged in the material transition of the body and mind, energetically vibrating with faith in a different kind of progress, with new forms beginning to take shape.
Corporate Collections
Waterstone Human Capital
Ridout and Maybee LLP
The Strategic Coach Inc.
Argosy Partners
RCOMM Radio Inc.
ExperiencePoint Inc.
Jim Russell
Email: jrussell@lennard.com
Instagram: @jimrusselltoronto