This week on WAIA, we sit down with Ariana Page Russell and muse over the power balance between model and artist, the line between beauty and disgust, embracing imperfect birth stories, making the private public, feminism in and out of the work, the ability to exist artfully, and… kelp!
Ariana Page Russell is a visual artist with dermatographia. She creates images that explore the skin as a document of human experience, using her own hypersensitive flesh to illustrate the ways we expose, express, adorn and articulate ourselves. You can find out more about Ariana and dermatographia at Skintome.com and ArianaPageRussell.com
Russell has exhibited internationally and currently resides in Los Angeles, California. Recent exhibitions include Shrine Empire Gallery in New Dehli, India; the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin; Magnan Metz in New York City; Platform Gallery in Seattle; Town Hall Gallery in Australia; the Luminato Festival in Toronto; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bolivia. Her work has appeared in Art in America, the Huffington Post, Wired, The Atlantic, VISION Magazine: China, and the monograph ‘Dressing’ published by Decode Books. She was featured on ABC News 20/20 and was a recent participant in the Sexto Encuentro Mundial de Arte Corporal in Caracas, Venezuela. She received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2005.