Digital Derby

This work is from Ricky Swallow's first solo exhibition, Repo Man held at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney in 1998. "Part of the pleasure of Repo Man was that the things he chose to give time to were so common and disregarded. This was not long after the brief ascendancy of the stylistic tendency dubbed 'grunge', and it was easy, on hearing of a young artist who made models of old hi-fi gear from cardboard, to imagine some strategically shabby objects patched together from, say, duct tape and pizza boxes. But the work in Repo Man was something else. Hunkered on low grey plinths were some of the quietest sound-systems ever built. Working with a Stanley knife, compass cutter, steel ruler, and sheet after sheet of grey binder's board, Swallow had fashioned 1:1 models of the video games and tape decks that time forgot: The X-Bass Woofer, the Stereo 'Twin', the Turnin' Turbo Dashboard. Entering the show felt like stepping into a hi-fi shop whose contents has somehow been three-dimensionally Xeroxed.

Timing is everything in Swallow's art. The Repo Man sculptures demonstrated his knack for pausing objects at the very moment they emit their last pulse of currency...

But for kids born in the suburbs of Australia in the 1970s, these tape decks and boom boxes had been dream possessions, objects stared at and longed for in their every detail; inside their sleek exteriors, songs were recorded, stored, ritually replayed. And here was an artist, like some hobby shop Proust, bent on recounting every detail." (J Paton, Ricky Swallow - Field Recordings, Melbourne, 2004, p.13 & 16)