A pride of cheetahs with dice for hats. A wise man from a nativity crèche, hawking a tin full of glittering baubles. An army of plastic dinosaurs, aiming tiny plastic guns. Miniature chickens, towering over an eensy-weensy farmer. These are some of the scenarios in artist Clark Russell‘s “Riddleville,” an installation that occupies most of his downtown Burlington apartment and that he has now documented in a photo book of the same name from Fomite Press.
“Prehistoric” Riddleville, Russell said, dates back to his childhood in St. Louis: “I commandeered the Ping-Pong table in the basement and made my first diorama.”
When he was a University of Vermont student in the early 1980s, playing with the punk band No Fun and living in a third-floor apartment near the Flynn, his old freezer grew an ice cave (as they tended to do). “That’s where ‘ancient’ Riddleville started,” he said. “And then it manifested itself onto the top of the refrigerator, then it started climbing the walls, and then it spilled out onto the floor.”
The Road to ‘Riddleville,’ Burlington Sculptor Clark Russell’s Work of a Lifetime
The Road to ‘Riddleville,’ Burlington Sculptor Clark Russell’s Work of a Lifetime
By Sally Pollak
Visual Art
“Modern” Riddleville, as Russell calls it, occupies 90 percent of that same apartment, where he has lived for more than 40 years. It consists mainly of two-by-fours forming 37 freestanding vertical towers with metal bases, as well as 32 “pilasters” affixed to the wall and an unknown number of wall-mounted panels. All of them sprout shelflike protrusions that hold Russell’s dioramas, which he calls “scenarios” — hundreds and hundreds of them.
Each scenario is an assemblage of objects ranging from scrap metal to plastic toys and ceramic tchotchkes to delicate glassware. Russell sources his materials from the ReSOURCE on Pine Street, Queen City Steel, and other thrifters and recyclers. Some of the objects are his own childhood toys. People also give him things, especially since the 2022 exhibition of Riddleville at the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery.
Russell describes Riddleville as a kind of compulsion, something fun to do outside of his “real” art of abstract paper collages and assemblage metal sculptures. But Riddleville is very “real”: Like much contemporary art of the past 40 years, Riddleville is environmental and site specific, having taken over his whole apartment. It’s reminiscent of Sarah Sze’s intricate installations, woven into the fabric of a building.
Riddleville’s scenarios suggest narratives, some direct — a Playmobil Michael Brown faces off against the Ferguson, Mo., police — and some cryptic or silly, which is in line with the artist’s personality. Russell is outgoing and friendly, a natural storyteller more than a modernist.
Given that, readers may be surprised to find that Riddleville in book form is spare, with no text (not even page numbers). It opens with an establishing shot of Russell’s living room full of towers; each subsequent page depicts a detail from the installation. This selective approach allows the reader to think about the story in each scene or the visual relationships between objects without being as overwhelmed as one is by a real-life visit to Riddleville. Russell’s photos offer the reader room for interpretation.
The strength of Riddleville is its spread, its volume of chaos, its celebration of the tacky junk we adore as children and discard as adults. Flipping through the book is a smaller experience. But it gives readers space to imagine themselves back at their own basement Ping-Pong table, reprising an abandoned game of pretend.
