Public Gallery is pleased to present Fear of Falling, the first UK solo exhibition by Chicago-born, London-based artist Russell Perkins. His practice examines the increasing financialization of culture, considering how risk, precarity, and economic imperatives register at the level of the individual. Engaging with the logics of prediction and control, Perkins adopts the aesthetics of administration to explore how speculation operates on visual, sonic, and spatial registers. Across the exhibition, political and financial structures are restaged as systems of belief, sustained by a desire for stability in the face of an uncertain future.
Perkins adapts the visual language of stock market prediction tools to map the text’s prosody – its poetic and musical qualities. Designed in collaboration with Hoang Nguyen and David Gobber, the text is performed by the actor Athanasie across computer speakers which punctuate the space. Here, ‘falling’ references the logic of the stock market, its volatility underpinning both an economic reality and collective perception of risk. Recalling banknotes or security papers, the individual pages readily confirm two lists of usual suspects through depicted repetition: the industries that uphold the American economy (oil, gas, insurance, finance, tech), and the demographics of their leadership.
A proprietary fragrance used at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas diffuses through the corridors. Titled Stay (2018), the work extends the exhibition’s atmosphere of seduction and control, drawing attention to the sensory strategies through which environments are engineered to retain attention and shape behaviour, moving from financial instruments into logics of gamification. In its entirety, Fear of Falling situates the viewer within political and financial systems, where knowability is continuously anticipated and deferred, and confidence is performed as a means of maintaining authority, exposing the forces that choreograph both ascent and decline.
