Alex Fischer: Adaptations ⓘ

"The more our world is rendered forth in visual images, the more things are left unexpressed"-Laura U Marks

1. The first line of your artist statement for Beyond the Fall, your second and most recent solo show at O’Born Contemporary, suggests that you aim to represent one of several facts about the time in which we live: the prominent influence of the internet on daily inter and intra-personal behaviours. You deem personal computers with internet capabilities to be the prevailing first-world interface through which we not only receive information, but also mitigate our belief systems and cognitive perceptions. Can you describe in more detail your conception of zeitgeist and why you feel it is an artist’s responsibility to deliver it to their audience through artistic media? To me the conception of zeitgeist shouldn’t exceed an empiricistic understanding. The spirit of our time is something we can measure… Computer sales are through the roof. Cellphones mean we have information at our fingertips. I think media itself is a spirit/zeitgeist of our time. Media is steadily permeating the lives of most people today. Images were made yet more predominant in our lives when we all sat down to look at screens everyday. I think I fall inline with the artistic tradition of of using what is available to me, in my case it made sense for me to use the near infinite sketchpad of photoshop. Artists are granted luxury of being everyday philosophers without having to exist in academia or other bureaucracies I see is as a personal responsibility to reflect the world back on itself.

2. To me, your work seems to embody the cultural dissatisfaction apparent today with the limits of visuality. We want to be able to "see" more, and not only through the avenue of optical consciousness. Is this a factor in your thought process? Yes, well we enjoy it. Our brains evolved to look at nature, now we live in concrete jungles and simulate what we don’t have: stimulation. I think the increased rate of change that contemporary people have experienced is causing them to expect more visuality, that the clarity and vividness of simulation will just keep getting better as it has so far in their life. Art has always belonged to this tradition as well, it just has a lot of extra stuff that can be attached to it as well because of how incredibly broad and focused the visual vocabulary can be.

3. Your work has persistently resonated with the tradition of painting, despite the hyper-contemporary content you are most interested in problematizing (digitally reproduced media). Can you explain the tension embodied by your work between tactile, painterly aesthetic and the slippery quality intrinsic to digital modes of production? I think of it sometimes as ’A Rich History’ versus ’A Digital Flood’. I have attempted to make a lot of my work under the practice of being as broad and richly ambiguous as possible. To me that allowed me to do a few things… things like do a lot of landscapes and portraits. We see them so frequently they’re easily digestible for anyone who’s looking at art. I want people to look, to draw them in. Once they look the content and technique have to do the work of contrasting their preconceptions. It is easy to argue that now most of the images that many people will see in their lives will be on a screen. I think of the creeping in of digital embellishment as a mainstay in artistic production. Many artists today produce, learn, if not communicate through digital means. So there is a back and forth between the historical and contemporary modes of working. Lili once remarked that there is a lot of nature in my work. I told her I thought I was sort of fighting back for nature. Art is so far removed from the common characteristics of Nature that it seems impossible to draw too many references to Nature in art.

4. Laura U Marks reinvigorated the art world’s interest in the concept of "haptics" as it relates to digital media in the earliest part of the current century. The theorist defines haptic perception as the ’combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies’. A paradox is witnessed in your digitally rendered images wherein, though they indeed belie the slipperiness of ’cool’ media, the eyes of the viewer begin to function like organs of touch, generating a physiological and phenomenological reaction to the abstracted images perceived. Is this super-conscious experience a recreation of the virtual yet dense relationships and understandings we form through today’s technologically-based interactions? That sounds spot on. The people who use social media are willingly doing it, their eyes are good at picking out detail in front of their face. They’re good at looking because they do it a lot and feel good about it as they do it. Art can provide a very good means for gathering people’s visual attention and using that attention to challenge their assumptions. Many of us are experiencing this shift at more of less the same time and I think it stimulates a reexamination of our relationships.

5. With the exception of "Bow" and "Daily", your colour palette has become far brighter. The hues you have selected for this body of work are often succulent and saturated in a way that assaults the viewer’s overall senses. "Untitled Gaze", for example, presents a near skeletal visage highlighted with bright sanguine-hued components that give the subject a grotesque, flayed-like appearance. Is this shift purposeful or unconscious? In the instance of "Untitled Gaze", are your tonal choices meant to magnify the gorey, Frankenstinian agglomeration of the subject—perhaps as a metaphor for the way in which human personalities and daily experiences are cobbled together from re-appropriated matter today? "Untitled Gaze" was made in a spontaneous way, but when I started to see those references emerging I went with them. So I think they can be a metaphor. We are the product of our environments and my work is a product of it’s assemblage. It’s hard to describe the motivations for a moving interest in colour. To me colour has always seemed low on the public attention scale but high on their periphery. People notice grey palettes but consider them unremarkable. My earlier palette was informed mostly by the paint-like muddiness of mixing too many layers in photoshop. I had to make a deliberate push to colour my work.

6. Despite what can be perceived as an overall shift in palette, works like "Purple Jesus" promote variations in image quality, color, tonal variation, and even tactility in the space between the source and the viewer, creating a heightened subjective experience. You have intimated that the recombination of reproduced media (via collage) enables you to abstract the forms that emerge from your images, submitting your audience to a multitude of interpretations. Why is it important, within the context of your goals as an artist, to leave the work so open and malleable? If my art has to cause some conflict in a person I believe it should first seduce them. When I think of ’a person’ looking at my work I try to think of ’any person’. The sort of endless variety who will bring their own interesting interpretations. I think the ambiguity of the imagery and symbols end up sparking the way brains recall visual information. We’re likely to try and find something recognizable in something that’s abstract. We hallucinate patterns to a degree. We’ll stretch our imagination to try and realize what we see and in the process allot all sorts of associations on a thing.

7. Thinking back to the first time we worked together during a 2010 project for ArtBarrage.com, I remember discussing a work called "Artist’s Retreat" in which the themes of identity and human insularity were very prominent. I had asked you whether you felt that artists are burdened with perpetual loneliness because of their craft, at least insofar as they become isolated within their own thoughts or mechanisms of expression. In your most recent cycle of works, a piece entitled "Artists Image" bears an important resemblance, thematically and conceptually, to "Artist’s Retreat", suggesting that the notion of solitude within the context of artistic pursuits remains unresolved. Here again, the figure is presented in a hazy and barren landscape, though not relegated to a small land mass or island as in "Artist’s Retreat". In "Artists Image", it almost looks as though the figure has finally made it to shore, the breaking crests of waves advancing in the background. The digital "noise" that obscures the image makes the figure look like an apparition and cracks in the surface plane at the bottom of the work resemble both damaged photographic emulsion and plant matter sprouting from the inanimate material of piece. Could the insularity you continue to explore also relate to the inevitably private experience of using social media and computational devices? I’m going to first mention that "Artists Image" is quite a small piece. I wanted something so blatantly serving as a self portrait to be a small contribution to my body of work. The reading of that might most easily come from the relative size of the printed work. But at the same time I want acknowledge that I am present in the work. It’s a tug-of-war for me between the private experience and "the modern person" being a connected and informed person. There’s another way to think about this private experience and that is that a part of our thinking process is now outside of our mind and bodies. Journals and sketchbooks served as mnemonic devices and now they can exist in public. A facebook wall or blog can record experiences to be looked at again later. Insularity could also be considered a spirit of our age. Though when all that supports that argument is the age old saying "out of sight is out of mind", I think the permeating flow of information on the internet might be some sort of salvation from Insularity. What we think of as private experience today is something that still creates data and drives markets.

8. Tell me a bit about "Aurora", which seems to picture the intersection of the ultimate natural phenomenon and humankind’s current virtual lifestyle. The sky resembles a reverse screen projection upon which an anthropomorphic face is cast. Beneath the veil of the grid-like light pattern, a humble dwelling of sorts is apparent. A final contrast dribbles out towards the viewer as an electric blue river. Do you feel as though people in the most remote areas of the world—for example, the north—govern their lives in a similar fashion to the urban dwellers you aim to represent ? I think ’remote’ doesn’t mean the same thing it used to. I think the places that have more recently lost their remoteness have an interesting spot on the web in as far as there being a previously unknown cultural subset made public. My own narrative on this piece is futurological, a hologram environment by those people who have never see the real northern lights. Melting-pot versus increasing the number of subjective experiences.

9. How does your process differ between the creation of "Wallpapers" and "Art Works"? You have taken the pains to reconfigure your wall papers to different computer display’s aspect ratios. Have you considered how these ratios relate to or approximate human vision? What about contrast ratios (light/areas of darkness, humans can detect 300:1)? Aesthetically they’re mostly about trying to give a texture to phenomenologically derived concepts. "Digital Cells" "Underlying structures" "Pushing the digital envelope" They also have a directed purpose, that being something not too full and easy enough on the eyes to have as a backdrop to other things. They’re relaxing, they can embrace modernist principles and romantic ideals. I’m also focusing more on the translation of digital to physical, so these will serve as iterations of a material wallpaper I hope to include in future exhibitions. Re: Vinyl wallpapers.

10. Returning briefly to a discussion of traditional painted forms, for "The Infant and the Garden Hose", you chose a circular canvas, reminiscent of the tondo of Renaissance lore. This self-contained form, most notably enclosing man as a symmetrical and perfect being, defies the "picture window" of the typical rectangular painted composition and instead asserts itself as both subject and container of subject. You seem to have an understanding of how to harness the tondo’s power, first by placing the horizon line two thirds of the way up the composition and then balancing the yellow-to-blue spectrum of the sky which a brash crimson flag. What was behind your choices for this work? I knew I wanted to use a circular canvas. Computer’s might make it easier to make a circular canvas, but it’s still goes against the default layout of a digital image being a precise number of pixels. (the smallest possible canvas on a computer is one pixel, it takes quite a few before it can resemble a circle.) the main reason I wanted to make a tondo was to take advantage of its effect as a container of the subject. The rectangle is too easily taken for granted. Even though the image has a stretching landscape I wanted give the sense of it being a trap in and of itself. I was thinking about optics and how to represent a period of conception before optics informs our peripheral experience of ’The Real’.

11. "Adobe Mask" most obviously confronts the viewer with the materiality of collage—the shreds of "paper" cascading down and across the figure’s face do not look digitized but register as real physical debris. The work reminds me of what October writer David Geers and others have called Neo-Formalism, which "nullifies the specificity and discursive potential of its own materials and subsumes them in familiar Modernist idiom" Your use of digital media to exact the physicality of painting and cut paper has transcended beyond the simple appropriations of 1980s post-modern experiments in a way the reasserts the individual sensibilities of the artist. Do you see your work as neo-formalist in that your manipulation of what has become the ordinary media of today seeks a return to the agency of the artist as alchemist? I think the form and references to materiality in"Adobe Mask" both hinders and promotes the sense of unity in the work. I think it’s a bit ironic though because of its duality, it’s a simulation of collage (tradition). This simulation (a thing that isn’t what it seems to be) is useful for calling attention to the preconceptions involved in interpretation. It think it’s the work of the content to prevent those forms from providing only a strict modernist interpretation.

12. "Beyond the Fall", the work from which your OBC exhibition takes its name, exudes a mysticism both due to the concealed central figure and shorn, face-laden tree trunks distributed throughout the muddied landscape. The figure’s back faces us, revealing a nostalgic, harlequin-patterned coat atop which a smattering of white hair indicates his/her head. The objects at the figure’s feet and the bases of the surrounding trunks resemble skulls, gesturing towards the theme of mortality and vanitas. Is this, according to your artistic instincts, what the world might resemble beyond the fall of man? Is the mysterious figure a vestige of a past time? I think a Mad Max looking future is still on a lot of peoples minds. I don’t think it ever really could have existed and I don’t think the world depicted in ’Beyond the Fall’ is on its way. I can’t help but be reminded of all those generations of people knowing that their children would live in a world very similar to their own. Predicting the future 300 years from now nigh impossible. Predicting the future also seems to be mortal persons game. There seems to be two different contrasting inevitabilities these days… one being inevitability of death the other the persistence of knowledge. At this point it is unlikely even in worst case scenarios that we would wipe out the entire human species and all our knowledge, there are and would be extreme measures taken to save what could be saved. I think of this piece as a nostalgic look forward. The past has been defeated by the persistence of humanity. There is nobody left in the past, nobody who remembers the turn of the 20th Century. We already live 4 times longer than our ancient ancestors. Within a few generations humanity might achieve some form of relative immortality to what we live today.

13. Finally, there is a futuristic nostalgia about your art work that recalls Neo-Noir films such as "Blade Runner", in which technology and its social implications are fundamental components of a narrative set beyond our current date. Many of your images capture the world as a dystopia, bereft of warm human bodies and yet longing for their return. Is your outlook on our future interactions as a species pessimistic, or do you feel in producing such work you are encouraging your audience to be more aware of the paths we are laying for ourselves? I like to think about the most significant ways that technology affects our lives. A pressing issue, one that has a language in art history is the end of life, which technology has been doing its best to suspend. The pessimism is a little hard to pin down as i generally don’t think I’m a pessimistic person. Am I pissed off that I might be the last generation to have to face death. Or should I be more worried that extra long life might permit me to get spoiled or spoil the lives of other. The same problem faces all of society. People enjoy all these luxury’s and great experiences of life, they don’t want to die. But old habits die hard, the longer we live the more comfortable we get with what we do and how we think. We’re habit forming, and rapidly aging cultures have never had to face the pressure of a world collapsing beneath their feet.

I think Kierkegaard said something along the lines of "the aesthetic life is a selfish life".

Your work has yet to be thoughtfully contrasted against analog photography. Where photographs are custodians of a physically real time and space, digital images really have no index, but rather present a mental or psychological reality. How do you view your imagery’s relationship to the real in comparison to that of the photograph? Here, I am taking about analog photographs and their relationship to a referent. Photographs represent a duration in time and space that is backed up by real physical matter. It is not so with digital photography/imagery, as it is infinitely manipulable. I am wondering how manipulable images with no indexical relationship to physical space and time perform the function of depicting a verifiable version of the world.