This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 14, 2011 - The centerpiece of Cameron Fuller and Travis Russell's new show at Good Citizen Gallery is "El Dorado," a car fashioned out of woodgrain-printed cardboard, shocks made of plastic water bottles, and tin can headlights. El Dorado's not cruising any city of gold, but a simulation of a post-apocalyptic St. Louis -- which looks a lot like run-down parts of the city today, only here it's overgrown with a cardboard forest of Brancusi's "Endless Columns."
The back corner of the gallery is occupied by a funky black-light grotto, complete with "primitive" markings on the wall and opportunities for fun with a stamp pad.
The exhibition's title, "Saturday the Birds Fell From the Sky," refers to the simultaneous deaths of thousands of birds this past New Year's Eve, in places like Arkansas and Sweden. The exact cause of the avian deaths is unknown, though experts suspect fireworks had something to do with it; not surprisingly, conspiracy theories abound.
It's just that mystery, the mix of the marvelous and the mundane, the encroachment of the fantastic into the everyday contained in the bird story, that Fuller and Russell have tapped to create this strange, slightly paranoid, utterly enchanting environment.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.