Ascension

Brian Russell’s sculpture “Ascension” was installed as part of the original Titration series in 2007. The sculpture is 114 x 26 x 18” in size and is created with cast glass and forged aluminum.

Russell creates one-of-a-kind sculptures with metal shapes flowing smoothly into cast glass, giving the effect of unity, scale and structure. Producing works for both interiors and landscapes on a residential and corporate scale, Russell draws inspiration from the rhythms of nature, ancient artifacts, mathematics, science and, ultimately, his imagination.

Russell’s work is shown in many galleries across the country as well as at EarthSpace, his studio’s outdoor sculpture park northeast of Memphis, Tenn.

Russell wants people to use his sculpture as an excuse to mentally shift to another level of consciousness, to reconnect with themselves and to reflect and meditate with awe and amusement on his three-dimensional creations.

Dublin Arts Council chose the exhibition title Titration to reflect the addition of a new concentration of sculpture into the community’s midst. Titration is a common laboratory method used to add a measured quantity of a reagent, called a titrant, into an unknown reagent, called a reactant, to produce a chemical reaction.

The individual artworks reflect a metaphor of the exhibition’s name. Much as titrant is added to a reactant drop by drop, this exhibition was intended to change our community’s environment, artwork by artwork, as an endpoint of cultural identity is realized.

The Titration exhibition was curated as part of Ripple Effect: Artistic Impact of the Scioto River, a new project of Dublin Arts Council designed to offer ongoing and unique opportunities for visual, performing and interpretive art projects associated with multi-level investigation of the Scioto River.

Titration involves fluid properties in the figurative sense: our changing community, Dublin’s growing collection of public art and Dublin’s sense of cultural identity. In the literal, the exhibition dovetailed with the introduction of Riverboxes, another public art initiative that encourages historical and artistic exploration and response to the river in our midst.