“I pride myself on being a conjurer,” Clark Russell says.

The 63-year-old Vermont artist is standing in the middle of “Riddleville,” the sprawling installation that claims the near-entirety of his third-floor Main Street apartment in Burlington.

With 44 floor-to-ceiling wooden and metal towers supporting dozens of miniature intertwining “scenarios,” as Russell calls them, "Riddleville" is a provocative Xanadu of irreverent juxtaposition. He has been constructing it continuously since 1984.

The scenarios in "Riddleville" incorporate an enormous anthology of found objects and other curios that Russell has scrapped from dumpsters, collected from thrift stores, or, depending on who’s asking, purloined.

On any given platform affixed to any given tower, an antique brass lever from Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park facilities might provide a steampunk cityscape behind a rubber elephant carrying a scuba diver in its tusks. Or a golden tractor might balance on its grille before a stand of green plastic palm trees while an alien lights a barrel fire nearby.

Russell says he honors his impulses when putting his scenarios together, and rarely lets narrative impede an aesthetic inclination.

“I feel like a medium,” he says. “Like I’ve been commanded to do this.”

Despite the obvious physical influence “Riddleville” inflicts upon Russell’s life, leaving the artist with few personal spaces to himself, he expresses a tempered annoyance with the project’s popular appeal. At a 2022 inaugural exhibition of "Riddleville," at Burlington’s Amy E. Tarrant Gallery, Russell was embarrassed to observe long lines of curious viewers waiting outside each day, ready to explore his long-rumored and hitherto hidden city.

Russell would prefer long lines for his metal wall sculptures and abstract collages, which he considers to be his more serious pursuit. Recently, when Russell approached Burlington publisher Fomite Press with a 500-page manuscript that he refers to waggishly as his “artist statement,” the publishers agreed—tentatively—to publish it. They wanted the "Riddleville" book first.

“I have ‘Riddleville’ envy,” Russell says, jealous of his own creation’s acclaim.

Russell numbers his life priorities. His wall sculptures, he says, are number one. "Riddleville" is number six. His “conscious punk” band, Blowtorch, is someplace in between.

On stage with Blowtorch, Russell glowers at the audience, rolls his eyes in despair, and stares at the floor with his arms crossed, shaking his head in existential resignation. Off-stage, he is affable, hilarious, and down-to-earth.

Like many Burlingtonians, Russell came to Vermont to attend college and ended up sticking around. He is originally from St. Louis, MO, where he grew up among the city’s gentry. His lifelong antipathy toward the inequities of elitism, he says, was the subversive ballast to his peers’ high-societal conquests. He remains in contact with many of them, and some have supported his artwork over the years.

“I’ve been living with all these ironies,” he says. “I’m probably one of three people in my high school class who didn’t vote for Trump.”

His expansive manuscript is typical Russellian nose-thumbing at the expectations of artists to contextualize their work. When asked to provide an artist’s statement for the Tarrant Gallery exhibition, Russell wrote one: ”Is all we have worth all that we have done?” Then he insisted that the statement stay out of public view.

Similarly, the "Riddleville" book, published in November, has no words beyond a brief biography and the requisite publishing information. Russell photographed the installation himself, capturing over 4,700 shots for the final 112 images.

“There was enormous frustration in trying to capture ‘Riddleville’ within a book,” he says.

Russell calls "Riddleville" “literally figurative,” and guesses there are tens of thousands of items incorporated into the ever-expanding sculpture. Though there are vending machine toys and errant tchotchkes of myriad origin, the artist eschews overly obvious representation.

“There aren’t many Supermans in ‘Riddleville,’ Russell says.

Squeamish about summarizing his work, Russell offers that "Riddleville" inherently mocks human dependence on tech and material abundance while likewise acknowledging our collective achievements.

“History and aesthetics are really the two main ingredients of ‘Riddleville,’” he says.

Touring through his capacious 1862 apartment, Russell points out the small pantry where "Riddleville" began.

“Like many city centers, it sort of fell into disrepair as I sprawled out into other rooms,” Russell says. “But again like many city centers, it experienced a sort of urban renewal in recent years. The pantry’s been gentrified.”

He moves into what a more typical tenant might call the living room and hovers over a mysterious machine.

“This is the ‘Outer Space Transmitter,’” he says. “The first thing I ever made.”

The machine is built into the chassis of a quadraphonic sound system. He switches it on and various gizmos whir and spin in cosmically mesmerizing orbit.

“One time I told someone it could talk to aliens,” he says. “They looked at me quite seriously and they asked me, ‘So what are they saying?’”

Faint lights glow and with his vulturine grin, Russell watches his art work on its own.

Riddleville is available now through Fomite Press.