featured artists
E.T. Russian
I am a multi-sensory artist and cartoonist. My graphic journalism is currently in the traveling show Graphic Medicine: Ill-Conceived and Well Drawn hosted by the National Library of Medicine. My #RAMPSOFDISTINCTION series is on permanent exhibition at WA State Convention Center and recently featured at the Seattle Architecture Foundation and the Bellevue Arts Museum Biennial. My recent solo shows (multi-sensory installations) were DOUBLE CLEAR at Hedreen Gallery and CASTING SHADOWS at Jack Straw Gallery. My work featured in Girlfriends of the Guerrilla Girls at Center on Contemporary Art, and Out of Sight: Survey of Contemporary NW Art. I am the author of The Ring of Fire Anthology and have been published in a number of books including Graphic Public Health, Skin, Teeth and Bone: A Disability Justice Primer, Disability in American Life: An Encyclopedia of Concepts, Politics, and Controversies, When Language Runs Dry, The Graphic Medicine Manifesto and Gay Genius, as well as periodicals PEN Magazine, The Stranger, The Seattle Weekly and Real Change. My comic Girls Gone Bile is in the US Library of Congress in the feminist collection Bloody Pussy. I codirected the documentary Third Antenna, am a featured artist with Sins Invalid and have received support from Art Matters, 4Culture, Seattle Office of Art & Culture, Jack Straw Foundation, Short Run and the University of Washington. I am a documentarian at heart and I love a good story. In addition to being an artist I am also a physical therapist.
Grace Flott
As a classically trained painter with disfigurement and chronic pain I document and complicate what it means to “look different” by remixing European narrative painting frameworks with embodied modes of printmaking. Raised in white suburban America, I spent my youth striving toward normalcy in all its forms until I experienced a major biographical disruption due to injury that placed my body firmly outside of mainstream media representation. Daily I confront external perceptions of myself as either ‘normal’ or ‘other’ and I am not aligned firmly with disabled nor non-disabled identity, but rather occupy a liminal corporeality common to living with a visible difference. I resist reductive categorization and resurrect this in-betweeness from erasure and stigma by orienting my practice toward body liberation. Through inclusive portraiture, narrative painting and printmaking, I illuminate physical difference as a dynamic identity and trouble cultural binaries like abled/disabled, grotesque/beautiful, and pain/pleasure. Ultimately my work reprises art historical representations of women and socially challenged bodies in combination with disability culture and my personal symbology in order to create safety and belonging for all bodies. In doing so I touch on topics like performance, ritual, intimacy, invisibility/hyper-visibility, objectification and consumerism.