Scaling Second-hand Mountains
T
hrough the obsessive collecting of second-hand sporting trophies, anonymous vintage family photographs and amateur home video footage for use as ‘readymades’ in installation and video work, Elvis Richardson demonstrates how these objects—the detritus of everyday life—act as mnemonic devices but are also emptied of memory through their recontextualisation. Trawling through junkshops, garage sales, eBay and YouTube for source material, Richardson questions poetically how the meanings of objects invested with the connotations of domestic life are altered when severed from their original source. Left to collect dust on history’s scrap heap these totemic entities are bittersweet reminders of our mortality—beyond death, the things we own live on without us, indeed we cannot begin to imagine their afterlife.
Sporting trophies are signifiers of achievement, especially redolent with childhood nostalgia for days spent at school athletic and swimming carnivals where a trophy would be one of our first material understandings of how competition and achievement are signified. In fact, these generic mass-produced sculptures of triumph instil ideological meaning about how success and aspiration are measured. While competitive, goal-oriented power dynamics play themselves out in every facet of our personal and professional activities and relationships, it is in sport that these narratives of ambition to achieve are played out so literally. We spend much of our lives aspiring for success, muscling out competition where necessary, and rationalising setbacks to our lifelong trajectory of accomplishment. However long our lives might be, they are marked by a finish-line of death, beyond which the collected markers of our successes can and often do go astray. Richardson is a collector who rescues objects from the temporary death of the second-hand marketplace by indexing the amplified grandeur of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline