Scratches on the Film features works by seven artists exploring the manufacture of meaning through transformation, psychological masks, performance, and artifice, the exhibition brings into conversation artists with deep investment in superficiality. A shared attentiveness to surfaces, veneers, and the appearance of appearances, reveals ideas about abjection, repression, impulse, and potential violences. This intergenerational and international group of artists embrace seduction and narrative construction to consider a multitude of art historical issues including originality, appropriation, the muse, control, and aesthetics. _____ For the past several years Robert Russell has painted still lifes of teacups and Allach Porcelain figurines. His latest series depicts Judaica—kiddish cups, havdalah sets, challah platters—now housed in public or private collections, but originally from what is now the Muslim world, where Jewish communities flourished for centuries, across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Removed from their original domestic and ritual contexts, immortalized and remembered in Russell’s oil paintings, the exhibition raises questions about cultural ownership, memory, and preservation.