Kara Virginia Russo’s Planetary Soul Sketches for Jasper’s Tiny Gallery

Kara Virginia Russo is an emerging visual and performance artist based in Greenville and Columbia, South Carolina, who creates intimate portraits of her own and others’ inner selves. For the month of July, she is Jasper’s featured Tiny Gallery artist. 

Russo is a multimedia artist who works in ink, drawing, embroidery, collage, and found objects, both on paper and in sculpture and assemblage. This variety of style and texture allows her to parallel the rich images that flow and intertwine in her mind. 

Though she went to art school, afterwards, she “didn’t make art for around 12 or 15 years,” feeling like it was “a language [she] didn’t speak.” When she finally started again, she naturally gravitated towards circles.  

“I made circles because they felt incredibly symbolic. Everything in my life was changing all at once during that period, and the circles stood in for all the feelings and questions and explorations I was having around my ideas and beliefs about God,” Russo details. “The perfection of the circle, and the inability to draw a perfect one by hand…there was a lot of things I was playing with that I could make sense of visually and let go of needing to think verbally for a while.” 

Russo shares that, “upon her adult diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, she embraced her inner imaginative world and her love of symbol, pattern, and repetition and developed a visual vocabulary and the mixed media techniques to support it.”  

“I began exploring an imaginary world of my own, in which the planetary landscape gave me a visual vocabulary for interactions with myself and with God,” she describes. “I've always just thought of this place as simply The Planet. I'm still playing with those things, which is why much of my work feels planetary.” 

Russo uses these skills to craft not only the visions within her own mind’s eye, but to gaze at the energy of those around her, taking what they cannot see of themselves and reproducing it. Beyond her solo work, she has collaborated on several musical projects, contributing visual art and experimental film, as well as live ritual-based performances.  

Her style has taken a distinct shape, one formed from “filling up sketchbooks as fast as [she] could.” Though many of her works start in a sketchbook as individual pieces, she has even begun mounting and framing entire sketchbooks behind glass. 

“It makes the pieces feel like museum artifacts or something. Explorer's notebooks, like I've gone to the planet, looked around at how things work and look and grow and move, and come back with my explorers notes and diagrams and drawings,” Russo shares. “And of course, the planet is just a stand in, a way of exploring reality that tries to get behind things and into the essence. Or, thought about another way, I make windows into reality. The reality we can't see. In this way my work functions a little bit like religious iconography.” 

Russo’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in North and South Carolina and Germany, and responses to her work still overwhelm her: “I like to joke that if you make several thousand circles, eventually they become so interesting that people start wanting to pay money for them (which still amazes me. Every. Time.).” 

For her Tiny Gallery show, Russo has collected pieces from two of her series: Music of the Spheres and Tiny Sketchbook. Her Music of the Spheres series is a cacophony of shaded circles, given direct and relation by electric white lines. Her Tiny Sketchbook series expands these images with further texture and detail, as ink expertly bleeds and threads dip in and out of the paper. 

“Beauty has a way of putting things back together; my art practice is a way for me to throw open the windows of my interior and let the sunshine in,” Russo describes. “I'm always hoping that the finished art does that for other people too.” 

Virginia Russo’s work will be available to peruse and purchase via Jasper’s virtual gallery space until July 31st.

Virginia Russo Joins Saul Seibert for Artists Showing Artists THIS THURSDAY

For the first installation of the Jasper Project’s Artists Showing Artists series taking place this Thursday night at 7 at The Living Room, Saul Seibert chose Artist Virginia Russo as one of the artists he would like to feature. 

Kara Virginia Russo is a visual and performance artist who grew up in the tiny lake towns of 1980's central Florida, before moving north and earning a BFA from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. After living for a while in both Asia and Europe, she returned to settle with her husband and two children in South Carolina, where she splits her time as an artist between Columbia and Greenville. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions from Charleston to Asheville.  

Most recently, she collaborated on Zion: a Composition by Saul Seibert, contributing album art, projection visuals, merchandise design and creation, and live ritual based performance art.

According to Russo, “My job as an artist is primarily to SEE, and only secondarily to communicate what I see. In expressing what is unseen (both within and without), I have found it helpful to use the visual language of an inner world I think of simply as The Planet. I like to explore the tension of navigating the wild terrain of the unseen from the safety of the imaginary. Think of my work as paintings, photographs, and explorer’s notes from a place you’ve never been, but one which feels immediately familiar.

“My pieces are built of layers upon layers of wet in wet watercolor and ink, relying on long experience to predict what the unleashed media might do, while staying open to surprise. Over the wet media (or occasionally under), I layer pencil, oil and chalk pastel, collage, and embroidery. I think of the wet media as attempts to paint mystery, and the dry media as attempts to expound and interpret to myself what I have painted, like notes in the margin of a well-loved book.” 

Russo continues, “My collaboration with Saul on Zion happened one day while he was looking at some of my recent work. I remember him sending me a message in response to some pieces that read simply, "I know this place."  I felt the same way the first time I heard the beginnings of the music. The work we've done together has been based on that ever since. We are artistically walking the same landscape. I see my role as simply making visible what is already there inside the music. When I listen to Zion, I'm transported to this place that is unique to Zion but is set in some other corner of my own imaginary world that all my work comes from. I can walk around, explore, see the features of this world, and then come back and paint it. The performance art is the same, I use the body as an instrument to convey visually the emotions and narrative of the piece in real time for the audience at live shows. I contribute all visual art for the project, from designing and hand printing the shirts, to the album art, to the bank of film that Ash Lennox, who does our live visual sets, pulls from. It's an incredible piece of music, and I still can't believe I get to collaborate on it. The musicians are phenomenal, I'm blown away every single time they play it.  

“Zion as a project was more or less part of my life as an artist for two years, from the very beginning of the project. It provided the steady thread all through an overseas move back to America, and all the transition that came with it. Zion stayed the same, I think the project kept me sane.  

“When the collaboration began, I had only been making art again for a year after a decade long hiatus. Zion provided the framework I needed to find my voice and confidence. I would ask Saul his opinion, and he would just say that he trusted me completely. I had complete artistic freedom, which was intimidating at first, but challenged me to grow as an artist in ways I'm grateful for. I grew into the project, in a sense. Every now and then, Saul would say something like "wouldn't it be cool if..." and I knew I was about to learn to do something I didn't think I could do. I picked up whole skill sets I had never tried before, ranging from stop motion, to illustration, to block printing. Saul had such confidence in my abilities, anything seemed possible. On top of that, Columbia has welcomed me into the creative community, and I can't imagine making art without all this support.” 

Join Jasper on Thursday night as we facilitate Rebekah Corbett’s project, Artists Showing Artists with Saul Seibert. Saul has invited poet-songwriters, Alyssa Stewart, and NoN (Keith Smyly), as well as his band King Saul and the Heretics. Art will be on display and available for sale by Virginia Russo, Adam Corbett, and Emily Moffitt. 

Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. 

The Living Room, 6729 Two Notch Road #70, Columbia, SC, 29223

Tickets

jasperproject.org/artists-showing-artists/tickets

Refillable Jasper cups for beer and wine will be available for $10 as well as hotdogs and a selection of baked goods. 

All proceeds go toward supporting the Jasper Project’s mission.

REVIEW: CMA's Baker and Baker present Zion. A Composition by Saul Seibert

Zion. A Composition

Live at Columbia Museum of Art

Thursday, Nov 17th, 2022

Baker & Baker Series

by Kevin Oliver

An ambitious instrumental and visual art piece conceptualized by Saul Seibert with help from artist Virginia Russo, multimedia from Ash Lennox, and a cast of fellow musicians, Zion. A Composition came alive in multiple dimensions on Thursday evening at the Columbia Museum of Art, as part of their ongoing Baker & Baker concert series. 

Seibert opened the evening with a short explanation of the story behind the composition, and as he told the family background in front of multiple members of his own family in the audience, the anticipation in the audience built. The delineation of the three acts: The Diaspora, The Sojourn, and The Ascent, was a useful glossary of sorts for the crowd to reference, but as the piece unfolded, there was no visual division on screen or stage to indicate when one movement ended and a new one began. As such, at several lulls in the program audience members interjected applause and exclamations, seemingly unsure if something was ending or maybe just overwhelmed with appreciation of what had just transpired in a concluded segment.  

With two of the three movements already released for a while prior to this live performance, and the third just completed, it was still a much different experience watching the musicians perform the entire piece live. Left to right, they filled the CMA stage: Seibert’s older brother Zach Seibert (E.Z. Shakes) sat quietly cooking up some sinister electric guitar tones, Marshall Brown contributed keyboard swirls of varying tone and intensity, Kevin Brewer held down the beats even as they came and went throughout, Darren Woodlief, also seated, provided a solid bass presence that asserted itself fully in the final movement. Sean Thomson was the musical wizard of the night, starting on spooky, sensual sitar and moving to steel guitar and some wicked electrified mandolin. Seibert himself stood center stage, hollow body guitar in hand throughout, the ringleader of this spiritual, musical circus troupe.  

Every musical composition has an arc, that up-down movement that gives it an interesting story to tell. Zion’s first movement, Diaspora, came through as a slow-building bundle of potentialities, with the audience a bit on edge, unsure of where it might be headed, perhaps. The preshow preface alluded to one beginning to rid themselves of preconceived ideologies, attitudes, and casting those things out, and the music reflected such a sweeping task. Thomson’s sitar was prominent through the early passages, giving this portion a raga-like intonation that allowed listeners to settle into the aural universe of Zion.  

As the middle section opened up, the music soared, searching for those times of sojourn, as the movement’s title suggests–those places of rest, as one searches for home. At times the band resembled arena rockers on an extended jam, bluesy and blustery and supremely confident. In these sections, the drumming and the guitars evoked the percussive jazz plains of Steve Tibbetts’ 1980s work, or a more democratic take on the guitar orchestras of Rhys Chatham. In between those searing, searching sections the dynamic shifted to hushed tones, leaving sometimes a single instrument moaning, or clicking along softly as the band reloaded for the next swell like a surfer coiling his muscles for the next wave. 

It is in its final movement, however, that Zion finds, well, Zion. The Ascent is a lumbering leviathan of a groove, somewhere between Soundgarden-level grunge and the groaning Krautrock grooves of Can or Neu!, just a beast of a display anchored by Woodlief’s mammoth bass riffing. Again, however, there are interludes, lulls in the action. Life isn’t all one trajectory, after all, and neither is the ascent to Zion, musically speaking. The mountain does eventually get conquered, and in conclusion the music doesn’t so much fade away as plant itself on the peak and say “done.”  

Visually, artist Virginia Russo’s live painting/art added a facet to the proceedings that didn’t have to be there, but the performance was richer and fuller for it. As the band’s musical arc proceeded to rise and fall, so did Russo at the front of the stage, clad in black with a rolled out white canvas in front of her. She proceeded to paint over the entire canvas with her hands, no brushes, and then pick up the fully paint-saturated canvas and cut it into long, increasingly narrow strips. Those, she then rolled up before pulling them back apart, one ripped square at a time. The squares were then arranged on a new, clean white canvas to make a totally different piece of art. It was a perfect visual analogy for the thematic elements of the musical composition and served to reinforce those themes as the audience both listened and watched the proceedings.  

Other parts of her artwork for Zion were projected throughout as sometimes moving images on two large screens behind the musicians, lending a psychedelia gauziness to the already evocative visuals. 

Overall, I’d call this a nearly unqualified success, to write and perform such a challenging piece of multimedia art here in Columbia. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it locally, and Seibert’s prior resume as a garage rock raconteur certainly wouldn’t have hinted at the possibility of something like this coming forth. Going in, Seibert told me himself that there would be very, very limited live performances of this project, and I understand why–the preparation and commitment of all the participants was fully on display for this one.