‘Torpor Audit’
Scenario One. After the apocalypse, those artists remaining on Earth have been forced to retreat into their studios to assemble quasi-functional structures out of the material detritus of super-modernity. Channelling a half-remembered litany of forms and contexts, they attempt to construct tool-kits for survival in a newly formed wild.
In one corner of the room, a metre-high floor lamp modelled after Kubrick’s Monolith bleakly illuminates its own context. On the wall to the right, a piece of clear Perspex decorated with a colourful, Ken Done-esque collection of painted dots and dashes partially screens a gesso-covered chunk of the artist’s studio floor: a topography of used surfaces now preserved for posterity. Just above head height, an industrial curtain of thick blue plastic strips slices through the space on a heavy diagonal, while beneath the stairs a small white architectural model of a house spins rapidly on a rotary motor, its form distorted by the flickering pulse of a strobe light. Every few minutes or so, the strobe and the motor cut out, allowing the house to coalesce briefly into a recognisable form before the cycle begins once more.
There is a distinctly Ballardian flavour to Stephen Russell’s recent works, a kind of post-functional exhaustion that calls up hazy fragments of a dilapidated modernist dream. Sol LeWitt’s cubic geometries are re-purposed as the basis for rudimentary domestic furnishings (Sol lamp, 2013), while Proust’s search for lost time is reduced to a commercial T-shirt logo, papered loosely in printed multiples over a paint-stained board (Losstime (Torpor Audit), 2013). ‘I’m interested in what happens after the end’, Russell admits. ‘There’s a speculative dimension to the works, like the