“Honey, stop the car, it's perfect,” “gated creekside,” “nicely upgraded,” “cozy,” “private paradise,” “tremendous upside potential,” “beachfront opportunity,” reads the written words of Russell Crotty’s Extinction.
What the artist calls, “bad poetry,” is a collection of terms and language gleaned from real estate listings strung together.
“The language [of Extinction] is about propping up your dreams,” Crotty shares, “[But it is also about] the extinction of the landscape, the effect of late capitalism, the disappearance of the night sky.”
An amateur astronomer, Crotty has a long history of combining art and science. As a teenager, Crotty filled his days with ball-point pen doodles and his nights with work in a local astronomy club.
Just as his sketching led to monumental drawings, some measuring as large as 20 by 20 feet, his passion for astronomy led him to build his own observatory in the Malibu hills outside of Los Angeles.
The marriage of these interests can be seen in his globe series, like Extinction. The body of work blends astronomy, landscape, mapping, and drawing.
What began as flat drawings became circular motifs – as you would see through a telescope’s lens – before naturally evolving into the three-dimensional form.
In Extinction, Crotty’s found poetry wraps around the globe creating both the southern hemisphere and a landscape beneath the night sky, the incessant ball-point pen writing giving way to the beauty of the watercolor above.
Extinction challenges the traditional understanding of drawing and even how we consider works on paper, but also blurs the lines of art and scientific observation.
“There's a gray area between making a useful observation and making a decent drawing. At a certain point you have to let go of some of the quantitative aspects of the science and let your imagination fly a little bit,” the artist explains, adding “It's about all of it coming together.”
