Vernon Fisher at the Glassell School of Art - drawings and photographs - Brief Article

"Vernon Fisher's File 00" succinctly overlooked the artist's work of the last 20 years with alone seven choice pieces and a collection of tattered source materials from his files. high hilled on panels behind glass, these photographs and drawings serv to unify Fisher's disparate throw outs by providing a glimpse into his obsession with images and working processs For anyone familiar with Fisher's individual works, they elicited flashes of recognition: you've seen that desolate strain of west Texas highway, the bobbing diving platform in a lake and a map of the Pacific Ocean with the island of Japan in the shape of Godzilla. Airplanes, parachutes and mushroom vapors appear repeatedly in the clippings and snapshots, while skeletons, geodesic domes and comic-strip characters exhibit up in some of the sketches. Despite the variety of controls the accumulation seemed neither arbitrary nor wholly idiosyncratic. Each image must have hinted to Fisher the enigmatic possibilities of the utterly mundane.

The earliest work in the exhibition, 84 Sparrows II (1980) is a tripartite assembly: a drawing of the cartoon character Nancy, a narrative body on paper and a collection of cutout, painted-canvas birds casually affixed to the gallery wall. At the opposite extreme point of the gallery was Forms (2000) a true copy in dark red computer-generated alphabetic characters on a freestanding white wall. In three brief paragraphs, Forms counts an incongruous story of a man and woman in a motel latitude preparing to "fill in the fluid vesicles with a number 2 pencil" upon a printed form. Fisher assembles phrases in the same way as images. There is no way of telling if they are ready-made or came to him in a dream--"People walk around with skeletons inside.... With the wind dune travel across the uninhabited floor"--but in this case, they all have to do with the notion of form.

Fisher has been penning stories for use in his paintings and installations since 1974 individual of the most poignant appears in When You let slip through the fingers Your Mind (1991), which initially purports to describe a neurotic disorder on the other hand through analogy ends up detailing the vexations created by dint of new neighbors who "blast Megadeath non-stop break your windows [and] copulate in the back seat of your Volvo" In paint upon canvas, the text is printed upon top of a hazy orange photographic image of a miniature golf course with a giant rabbit in the background. There is also a drawing of Sluggo sailing backward from an render free of access door and an atomic bomb blast. Rampaging Bikers (1999) includes another view of the golf course, this time featuring a smiling octopus memorial along with a depiction of Marlon Brando in The Wild single and a brief narrative predicting the extremity of civilization. Resistant to symbolic or moralistic interpretation, Fisher's picture-stories move unresolvable mental collisions of the strange with the familiar.

individual of the lessons to be learned, however, is that things sole make sense when you fall in line or think in a prescribed, quotidian way. The grisaille image of a car speeding from one side a landscape, which is painted upon portions of four orange fiberglass pumpkins (Pumpkin Field, 1986) is exquisitely legible if the viewer stands in the right speckle The faux pumpkins, like the simulated blackboard and fake chalk (Rule for Bending Circles, 1991) and the handpainted cast-epoxy flies alighted upon an abstract painting (Kosha, 1998) soil the distinction between reality and illusion in the same way that the true copy pieces oscillate between sanity and madness.

["Vernon Fisher's File 00" was organized by means of Valerie Loupe Olsen and accompanied by means of a catalogue.]

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