Kris Russo, Exto, installation view, Eva Maria Ocherbauer 2017.
Born USA, works and lives in Southern California, USA
EXTO 2017
Site-specific installation. 47 charcoal drawings on paper, 100 candles and 350 matchsticks.
Courtesy of the artist
To fall in love, to be in the gutter, to rise up, to go under— embedded into our language and our particular use of it is a tendency to conceptualize abstract ideas spatially. What then does it mean to live on the edge? Who inhabits this “edge” and what happens when we unearth their stories? EXTO is not a means to an end, nor is it an attempt to reinforce archetypal narratives of martyr and villain, but rather an invitation to explore these questions.
Upon entering the participatory installation, the viewer becomes co-present with the ensemble of candles, hand-drawn sketches and other found objects in an intimate, dark space. The charcoal portraits, drawn on assorted paper, history notes and pages torn from books, give hints of their stories, of individuals who have all, in some way or another, lived on the edge; an enslaved wet nurse, a Brazilian bandit, a child with Hansen’s disease, a Herero woman, an El Salvadoran guerrilla soldier, a “comfort woman”, an intellectual imprisoned in Siberia. A pile of matches on a makeshift altar acts as an invitation to light a candle, a ritual that evokes prayer at a Catholic church, and in this way the viewer is able to take part in a complex process of collective meaning-making through memory, nostalgia and/or apperception.
