John Russell “SQRRL”

Bridget Donahue presents SQRRL, a solo exhibition with artist, writer and performer, John Russell. On Saturday November 14th, the exhibition’s opening reception will coincide with the debut of JUDGEMENT NOW, a performance by Head Gallery, presented in conjunction with Performa15.

Text

SQRRL, 2015
The text describes the story of a non-spectacular future where humans can inhabit the bodies of smaller animals. And where squirrel/rodents have been identified as the ideal body-form for space travel. Also including a survey of contemporary engagements with the ‘post-human’. The text will also be published by Rhizome (November 2015).

Film

SQRRL/BRUCE WILLIS, 2015
The new film presents the SQRRL text layered over another text Bruce Willis, Irigaray and the Aesthetics of Space Travel, 2014 - to create a new artwork. This is an additive process, one thing added to another, not a synthesis.

Print

Mirror Mapping the Stars, 2015
The new back-lit digital image - the largest to date - presents a scene of people, animals, hybrids or people dressed up as animals dancing in a cloud landscape. This may be a representation of a future world and transformed social relations within which acts of violence or intensity may be taking place. The scene may also contain the representation of a scene of future evangelism, with some transformed but reactionary version of Christianity.

Painting

Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time/ External Recurrence/Monad) II, 2015
The painting is a reworking of the print ‘Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time/ External Recurrence/Monad)’, 2010. The image depicts a proletarian dragonfly being dragged to a vortex (and oblivion).

Sculpture

Transformational Joy, 2014
The turtle sculpture is a representation of a turtle as either a type of crucifiction or as a mode of prehistoric space travel.

Untitled (Boxes), 2015
The painted soap and cat food boxes are objects which use the ‘colors of our dreams’ to sell us commodities, reclaimed as objects from the future. Objects existing in the present but evolving to meet a future rushing towards them.

EasyJet/Flies, 2015
The mobile, made in collaboration with Dan Mitchell, suspends fake flies and model EasyJet planes.

John Russell (b.1963, lives and works in London, UK) studied History of Art at Goldsmith’s College of Art and fine art at Slade School of Art and Saint Martin’s School of Art. He was a co-founder of the artists’ group BANK, of which he was a member for ten years participating in over fifty exhibitions and events, as well as several publications. Since leaving BANK in January 2000, Russell has worked both independently and collaboratively in producing exhibitions, publications as artworks and curatorial projects. His work has been shown at Treignac Project, Treignac, France (2013); The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (2013); ICA, London (2011); Focal Point Gallery, Southend, UK (2011); The Grey Area, Brighton, UK (2011); Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria (2011); Tate Britain, London (2010); and Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2009).a