Karen Russo
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Karen Russo, born 1974
Economy of Excess, 2005
Video, 9 mins.
Courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

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Karen Russo made use of a small video camera that had been mounted on a robot and dispatched into the sewage system of the English county of Essex to check the state of the seemingly endless tunnels. The resulting video records the changing colors of the walls and the water, without any computer intervention. This journey into the sewers is not only a sort of expedition to the center of the earth; it also resembles a voyage into the human body or into black holes in space. The hypnotic effect of the work and the colors it reveals, which sometimes recall the gold of Christian icons, hint at sanctity and spiritual exaltation. But the knowledge that this work was filmed inside a sewage system triggers contrary associations of bodily functions, slime, and waste that civilization tries to conceal from the eye. These contrasts combine the physical with the metaphysical to create the possibility of “redemption from the sewers.”