Chicago-born, London-based artist Russell Perkins explores the semantic universe of financialization, revealing how it shapes and creates shared visual mythologies. Often investigating the logics of prediction and control, Perkins adopts the aesthetics of administration and corporate culture (think infographics or lottery scratch cards) to investigate the meaning of “speculation”. For his exhibition Fear of Falling at Public Gallery, he transformed the space into a site of financial uncertainty and relentless attempts of prediction. The exhibition will stay open until June 7, when it will have a closing performance as part of the London Gallery Weekend program. For this chapter of The Mnemosyne, he talked us through some of the inspirations behind the exhibited works.
RP: Score from Water Yam (1963). I love these mysterious ‘event-scores’ that George Brecht made in the early 60s – deceptively simple instructions as artworks. I kept coming back to this one while I was working on the show at Public, which involves an enormous score in an invented musical language.
RP: These photos of a drowning casino are from 2011, but they capture this familiar predicament of wanting to bet on the future, but it’s too late.
RP: The way I start out projects is usually by mapping out ideas in a messy, non-linear way. It’s kind of like sketching, and it helps me avoid having the same thought over and over again without realising it.
RP: At Public, I’m showing a video that’s collaged together from found footage of American political celebrations across the last forty years. The video itself erases the politicians from the frame, but I spent a lot of time watching terrifying political speeches.
RP: I recently got to spend several months at K2, an amazing printmaking shop in Bermondsey, figuring out how to recreate the printing process used on lottery scratch cards.
These are gesture tests I made to try out all the different ways I could scratch the latex coating off an oversized scratch card.
And here’s a close-up from another test.
