Taly and Russ Johnson are visual artists. Their work is a mixture of video, photography, collage and book art. Taly is a Film and TV graduate of New York University, was born in Israel and has directed and produced several short narrative films. Russ is a Detroit native and a Cooper Union graduate. During his college years he worked as an assistant to video artist Ira Schneider, painters Richard Hambleton and Yvonne Jacquette, and photographer Rudy Burckhardt. Later he worked with the non-profit video art organization Raindance Foundation, curated the TV show "Night Light TV" and has been showing media art since 1984.
Taly and Russ met in New York in 1988 and worked together producing multi-media music shows with the performance group The Leisure Class. As a team, they continue to produce collage, video art, photography and artist books. They married in May 1992.
Their videos have been shown in festivals and galleries in New York; Linz, Austria; Novi Sad, Yugoslavia; Tel Aviv, Israel, as well as McMurdo Station in Antarctica
"We strive to capture, share and expose the unseen and overlooked, to find joy in the banal. With video we can discover a point in the pointlessness of everyday life." Taly has said.
The pair is best known for their brief abstract videos including the ghostly tribute to Nam June Paik "Nam June Paik's Fingerprints" that was finished on the eve of Paik’s death and presented in the Vienna Short Film Festival as an installation in 2006.