PRESS RELEASE Ward-Nasse Gallery Exhibit - NYC - February, 2005 Russell Connor's paintings, on view Feb. 1-27, 2005, at the Ward-Nasse Gallery at 178 Prince St. in Soho, inspired The New York Times to write, "Magically, Connor whisks away the artifice of art history to forge some deeper connections, and makes us smile all the while." The new show, called "Why Be Blue?" features prominently his startling variations on Thomas Gainsborough’s famous "Blue Boy". Connor described the work as follows, "I had been mixing masterpieces together to make new stories, new compositions, for a long time. I decided to shift to making variations of one painting. The Blue Boy was everywhere on calendars and postcards when I was young. I thought, this kid has been prancing around in satin, bows and ruffles for two hundred years, it's time he lightened up about color. Gainsborough himself had hardly been realistic, dressing his subject in a Cavalier costume from the 17th century. These paintings are a way to dramatically separate color from form." Connor’s engagement with art history derives from years working in museums, from Harvard's Fogg Museum to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, where he hosted a television series seen nationally called "Museum Open House", the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, where he organized the world's first museum show of video art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where he produced several award-winning programs about their collection and Biennials for broadcast on PBS. "My subject is that mixed-up mental museum we all carry around, due to the proliferation of art reproductions in the past fifty years. Is it Goya? Is it Manet? Is it Degas, or Toulouse-Lautrec? My submersion in the worlds of television and video art introduced me to the electronic manipulation of images. A now venerable masking technique called chroma key, that permits a news anchor on 57th St. to appear to be in Red Square, inspired me to think about entering into masterpieces, shifting foregrounds and backgrounds to create new stories, an alternate art history." Connor's contributions to a show called The Art of Appropriation at New York's Alternative Museum in 1986 moved the critic Joan Marter to describe them as "Post-Modernism brilliantly exemplified." The artist says "the term appropriation is too bland. Piracy has a more swashbuckling sound. But it's got to be creative piracy." The artist was trained at the Massachusetts College of Art, and at Yale, with Josef Albers. -0-