Jim Russell: Human

Jim Russell, Human, 2025, print from original painting, 44″ x 64″

Jim Russell: Human

November 7 – December 11, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 7 – 8pm
assemblage, Toronto

Jim Russell 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 positionality (informed by experiences of historical and contemporary media, and social, cultural and political systems) to resolve the work.

Human is a larger-than-life image of an unknown female gaze. Derived from Russell’s Peacemaker series and scaled to fit within the dimensions of the assemblage storefront window, the eyes survey the street with a melancholic stare that refuses any single resolution.

Russell’s works arise from a faith in the unity of humanity and a faith in modernist ideas of progress. Russell writes: “The connective tissue of unity works with and against the interests of the individual who must answer to both unpredictable human emotions and the human and non-human community, making the promises of modernism difficult at best…”. Russells’ paintings deliberately hold this contradiction in tension to explore how both are deeply human and imperfect.

About Jim Russell

Jim Russell’s paintings explore critical questions about media, technology, gender, relationships, politics, capitalism and the truth of the image itself.

In 2023 Russell completed a major series entitled Men in Cities that seeks to celebrate and critique the power and optimism of twentieth-century Canadian modernism. Russell positions images of a striving male subject from that era in tension with emerging forms of progress. The work explores how the utopian dreams of a united global humanity and modern progress are fundamentally at odds with each other. In this way, Russell’s work addresses “progress-guilt” to produce a new form of futurist thinking.

Russell’s newest black and white series entitled Peacemaker selects from a broad range of sources including his own photographs and found images from documentary film, tv and print. He is interested in how these images, whether viewed alone or in combination, can form a “Super Image”. To do this, he encourages viewers to expand their own narratives, while holding disparate points of view.

Russell holds a BFA from OCAD University (2020) and an MFA from York University (2023). Recent exhibitions include Gales Gallery, Toronto (2023), Collision Gallery, Toronto (2023) and Art Mûr Gallery, Montreal (2022).

For more information:
Artist Website: www.jrussell.ca

assemblage

assemblage is a public-facing storefront space dedicated to the exhibition of emerging and established artists. assemblage embraces “liveliness”: our research and activities consider questions such as: how are we interconnected with our environment, communities, and non-human ecosystems? Knowledge sharing and dissemination take the form of workshops, exhibitions, publications, and seminars. Our goal is to remain fluid as we embrace complex issues, acknowledge entanglements, and foster inter- and cross-disciplinary practices.

assemblage
2015 Dundas Street West
Toronto, ON M6R 1W7
assemblage-gallery.com

Accessibility:
assemblage is accessible. As a storefront gallery, works are viewed from the street.

assemblage acknowledges the ancestral territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of this land. We also acknowledge the Métis, Inuit, and Indigenous urban communities who share these lands.