“Janet Russek is an adventurous photographer. Although she is best known for lyrical black and white images in the twentieth century modernist tradition, these new series were sparked by an intense frustration about the relation of art to social crises. Begun five or six years ago, they comment on current threats to democracy as well as the subtler threats of invasive technology. In the Spam series, the texts were drawn from on-line rants. At first she was amused by the superimposition of these ultra-contemporary idiocies on classical sculptures and Renaissance paintings and the results were often humorous. Then, as the political situation we find ourselves in worsened, she too got more serious.

Not One More can be read as a plea or demand for an end to either rape, suicide, racist cop killings, the separation of children from families at the border, military casualties, or mass shootings (image). The images are both pointed and ambiguous. The irony of a (brown) pieta labeled this way is unexpected and complex. In each case, the interactions between text and image (as well as the changing typefaces) are subtly provocative, demonstrating the power of words to change the way we see. And it’s worth mentioning that Russek prowled museums seeking images and took her own photographs. Subjects range from LGBTQ rights to homelessness. Certainly the old masters (not to mention the invisible old mistresses) could not have predicted the Me Too or Times Up movements and the ways their subjects, from portraits to “history paintings” could lend themselves to a new polemic.

“Get the Help You Need in Treating Your Anxiety” is the exhortation on a series of contorted or morose faces reflecting from a chronological distance the all-too-close-up epidemic of anxiety among young people today. Russek cares, and only an emotionally armored viewer can escape the impact of these images.”

Lucy Lippard, 2018