Nocturnal (2023)
“Nocturnal” is Rusty Fox’s latest photobook capturing the body-like forms of plants in the city. Starting during the Pandemic lockdown in Macau, the artist sneaked out at night and wandered around and noticed that the plants were thriving more than ever. The vividness of the plants at a time when everything else is in perfect stillness has initiated the project. Despite his subject being plants, their body language speaks louder than words.
“Nocturnal” is an invitation to the parallel but alternative world, starting with the texture of the paper, the imagery narrative, and ultimately the whole reading experience, as if reading a mysterious tale from a vintage novel.
—
Epilogue:
Rusty Fox is deeply attached to finding the relationship between life forms and the inanimate. Before setting his foot in photography, he spent four years studying culinary arts in the UK. To someone who grew up in a city that is heavily dependent on the gaming and entertainment industry with cultures that pursue dissipated pleasure, living can be monotonously vain. Hence, during his internship in the catering industry when he had to face a room filled with frozen games hanging upside down, he experienced an epiphany, as a latent seed comes to sprouting, which slowly grows into following obsessions on lifeless objects, such as dummy and mannequin, and what makes them different from being mechanically alive. The experience has set the tone in his artistic practice, project after project, revolving and exploring around the motif.
‘The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams.’ — by Hans Bellmer
As night falls and the moon is high in the sky, the artist walks through the city and searches for Nocturnal, like a game of hide-and-seek, or in Bellmer’s words, the endless anagrams. It is by doing so that can he start to rearrange for what he has been seeking over the years.
Rusty Fox’s work seems to always arouse ambiguousness. Upon first glance, Nocturnal exudes a land of desolate soil, cast by peculiarity delivering the impression of detachment. Yet, as one carries on, there grows a sense of uncanny closeness, a connection lies within and is almost erotic and intimate, as if the awakening of some deep-buried desire. Here in Nocturnal, the creatures introduce a deviant spectrum to the eye, where in darkness manifest their radiant beauty. Their skin lay hardened, crinkled, and scaly, with occasional opens to holes that are both thrilling and inviting, as if connecting to a dangerous abyss that hints at the mysterious origin of life. Protruded stems and crooked branches elongating into forms seemingly dancing through delirium.
As beastly as they seem to be, they too share organs and spines, fingers and knuckles, veins running fast under the skin, vivid that almost the sound of blood flow can be heard. Then, there are exchanges of discourse, flows of emotion, and expressions of affection, struggle, and unreserved lust. You might find yourself peeking wondrously at the middle of a sensual ecstasy, a flush of embarrassment, yet with unspeakable delight. There is procreation, pain and joy, death and hope, and life after life. Watching the Nocturnal creatures with strange familiarity, one might think he has heard of them in one of H.P. Lovecraft’s old tales and finally come to witness, where the eminence of grotesqueness and flawlessness intertwine into an endless enigma.
It is not easy coming across their presence because the urban luminescence has been overcasting the city long enough that the people start to forget what it was like in the old days. If you look closely enough, however, marks and traces do surface eventually. In some ways, there are resemblances between them and us, but at other times, they retain qualities we have long lost. The unearthly encounter, nonetheless, in darkness celebrates life in their most genuine attitude.
Editor, Yang, 2023 Spring
—
Book Information
Author / Rusty Fox
Editor / Rusty Fox, Yang Sio Maan.
Book Designer / Yang Sio Maan
Publisher / Fizzy Ink Publishing Ltd.
Printer / Tipografia Macau Hung Heng Lda.
.
Printed and published in Macau, 2023 April
1st Edition, 300 copies
ISBN 978-99981-469-0-4
.
Book info.
21x17cm, Paperback, 44 pages
.
Price
MOP/HKD 200, USD 25