“Art seeks out the edges of things, of understanding; therefore its favourite modes are irony, negation, deadpan, the pretence of ignorance or innocence. It prefers the unfinished: the syntactically unstable, the semantically malformed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it shows it, since the highest wisdom is knowing that things and pictures do not add up.” –T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1984.
Epigraph of Sue Graze’s essay for Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words, Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 – April 17, 1988.
“Your normal experience of a painting is you see it as a whole first and then you see it in parts. My background is in literature and as a result the interaction is part to whole, not whole to part. You have to experience it in a linear fashion. Only at the end, and through reflection, do you get to see it. With my work, you are aware of the parts before you can construct the work visually as a whole. You are aware that the parts come from different modalities of representation. The text is part of a puzzle that you have to decode before you can read it as complete. Then there are vignettes that take the form of representation, and then there are the other elements that appear such as abstraction, representation, or other. You never get the experience where everything is seen as one piece; you get more of a partnership of elements. Chaos is at times more interesting in my works than harmony. The viewer gets to choose where to enter.” — Fisher in conversation with Middendorf.
Study Bikini, 1987 Acrylic on paper 42 1/2 × 48 in 108 × 121.9 cm Hiram Butler Gallery.
“[…] For the Dallas Museum of Art, the artist has created his most ambitious site-specific installation to date, combining traditional painting on canvas, three-dimensional sculpture, text and painting directly on the wall (12 elements all inclusive) over an architectural span of almost 200 feet. Fisher has choreographed the space to make the viewer aware of the processional nature of this architectural area, yet at the same time he subverts it- forcing the viewer to waver among text and image – a kind of balancing act that continually insists upon active audience participation.
[…] and finally ending with a large acrylic on canvas painting of the Bikini Island nuclear bomb test. Although the image has an awesome, frightful quality, it is distanced from the viewer, made to resemble a tattered disintegrating photograph. Here again Fisher employs the idea of interruption or static by placing an octopus image from a miniature golf course within the midst of this Bikini field. All seems conceptually askew, but both bomb and octopus share a similar bulbous, sensuous form, and both images are simultaneously strongly horrifying and banal.
Fisher’s Dallas installation begins with a text and ends with a painting, thus combining intellect and allusion into a complexly layered work. Questioning the notion of order, Fisher’s art insists upon a number of different experiences – visual, tactile, intellectual, emotional, and physical. Thus his strategy is truly the opposite of 20th-century precepts of a streamlined, controlled objective order. It moves from the cosmic to the mundane, the past to the present, from echoes of Duchamp to Magrittean surrealism, and Jasper Johns’ pop. Fisher has said, “There are really two stories in my paintings,” and indeed there may be more.” –excerpt of essay by Sue Graze.
Searching for the Miraculous is a trilogy of video/installation works that uses Bas Jan Aders final work, “In Search of the Miraculous”, as an entry point for a new experiential journey. The works explore identity, time, transcended experiences, and the romantic vision of a quest for something better. The project uses video, audio, music and sculptural elements to create a contemporary version of the trilogy. It starts with a cinematic short, then a connected journey between two people and finally concludes with a journey of a pair of glass jars floating across the sea.
Elizabeth Withstandley is from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is one of the co-founders of Locust Projects, a not-for-profit art exhibition space, in Miami, FL.
Her work is routed in conceptual art taking the form of video installations and photographic series. Artifacts, individuality, and music are all central themes in her work. In addition to exhibiting her own work she has organized a number of exhibitions including Smoke & Mirrors at the Torrance Art Museum, 20/20 at Locust Projects and a the 2019 residency project, work from artists at The Curfew Tower.
The55Project and Bakehouse presented works by NádiaTaquary, [who] “raises questions related to the knowledge and practices of the traditions of Afro-Brazilian jewelry. In her work, she uses wood, gold, silver, beads, conch shells, and other materials representative of colonialism and African religions, investigating their symbolism and highlighting their hope for freedom in a transatlantic slave context.
By revisiting these symbols of African heritage, Taquary transforms them into empowered and affirmative sculptures that evoke the necessity to bring forth dialogues on the African Diaspora.”
The works of Nádia Taquary (born 1967, Salvador, Bahia; lives in Salvador) investigate the practices and traditions of Afro-Brazilian jewelry and body adornments. By using materials representative of both colonialism and African religions, Taquary investigates their inherent meanings and symbolism while exploring representations of freedom in an Afro-Atlantic historical context. Oríki: Bowing to the Head pays reverence to the Yoruba culture-Ori meaning “head” and ki meaning “praise.” The sculptural hairstyles not only act as a metaphor for ancestral thought, but also point to the influence of African heritage seen in contemporary hairstyles. Living in Salvador-one of the first slavery ports in Brazil and now considered the center of Afro-Brazilian culture—provides Taquary with a rich history embedded in her daily life, allowing her to examine how ancient hair-braiding methods from African tribes, such as Fula and Himba, are kept alive as a form of resistance, affirmation, and identity formation today. As part of the Solo Project presented by The55Project, the artist spent three weeks in a studio space provided by Bakehouse Art Complex (BAC), where she further developed the Oríki series, creating the three sculptures seen at the center of this installation. Working in this space, which is adjacent to the Little Haiti neighborhood, the artist produced new works inspired by encounters she had while exploring the local diasporic experience and investigating how these histories are translated into Miami’s black community. Evoking both the beauty and symbolism of these ornate hairstyles, she celebrates African heritage by translating it into a contemporary language in her work, creating empowering and affirmative sculptures that conjure the necessity to bring forth dialogues on the African diaspora.
