This is built on the work of many people who wrote the tools, did the research and recorded the sounds, and shared them. Each is listed here, with a link to their own work.
Each painting opens as a place you can enter and fly over freely. Its light and dark are read as land, so every ridge and hollow is the paint itself. The sky over it is real and the weather where you are.
It runs in an ordinary web browser, with nothing to install or buy, the same for anyone with a link.
On the pressures of public persona, enantiodromia, and why our demons don’t define us.
Written in response to the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago's two-part podcast conversation about Hilde Lynn Helphenstein — revisited here in light of her recent death.
I hadn't heard of Hilde before the other day since I stay off most social media. From the sounds of it I'm not surprised that someone who felt completely helpless began to be relatable to others and went viral with their sharp cynicism and knowledge as power kind of challenge to the 'elites'. One of the problems with that though is that the role inherently shifts once the satirist becomes powerful themselves.
"Let's commiserate about how elites use their power" becomes the psychological weight of bearing that responsibility. The pressure to mask and become a saint rather than be the messy authentic version of oneself that was initially relatable.
Learning about "enantiodromia" here is incredibly valuable, but I think binary thinking around it can be dangerous. We need to practice self-acceptance, not shame, over the masks we wear to protect ourselves. Even Hilde's language about "extricating her demons" feels loaded with internal judgment about which parts of her psyche are "good" or "bad" instead of feeling like a whole person who contains both.
With how tragically her story turned out I just want to stress here for anyone struggling with their sense of needing to mask or protect themselves to try and respect your ingenuity and imagination even if what it's come up with makes you uncomfortable. Our demons may perform useful roles for us but they don't define who we are.
Alex Fischer (b. 1986) is a Canadian artist based in Toronto whose practice bridges painting and digital media, bringing together sensibilities of material craft and computational experimentation. Raised between early home-computer culture and the forests of rural Ontario, Fischer’s early exposure to both software and landscape continues to shape a visual language attentive to the overlap between constructed and lived realities. Since graduating with a BFA Honours from York University in 2010, Fischer has exhibited internationally, with projects spanning Toronto, Dublin, Beijing, Harbin, Hong Kong, Hawaii, and Shanghai.
Collaborations with Inuit artists such as 作为一只鸟 As a Bird with Saimaiyu Akesuk, Beijing (2023), and ᐃᑴᐅᐦᐅᑴᐳ Upon the Sea 海上 with Qavavau Manumie, Shanghai (2021), reflect an ongoing engagement with translation and representation across cultural and technological contexts.
Their work has been presented by institutions and galleries including NAMARA Projects, Sage Culture, Circuit Gallery @ Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, and Angell Gallery. Recent projects include Ejected Bodies, NAMARA Projects (2025); Non-Natural, Sage Culture (2024); Coronas, Ala Moana Center, Honolulu (2024); Portal, Dublin (2023); Art Show, NAMARA Projects, Toronto (2022); 在司徒 In Situ, Harbin (2021); and Story Tree, Toronto (2020).
Fine art prints are available to order, and select works are available for commercial licensing. For acquisition, exhibition, commission, or publication inquiries, please get in touch.
Two drawings by Qavavau Manumie, joined into one line for Abu Dhabi. In progress.
Kenojuak Ashevak’s woman between two great fish, across a wall and a narrow panel at Oakridge Park.
Ningiukulu Teevee’s woman in her amauti, dancing on tiptoe beside a column of berries, at the entrance of the Paris flagship.
Mary Pudlat’s Nuna Sukaq: people stacked into a cairn, a bird at the very top.
A child in a parka holds up a tree full of birds, and the branches run on across the next wall. Alex drew it from his own Story Tree of 2020, which began with Qavavau Manumie’s Breath of Life.
Drawings by Inuit artists from Kinngait, redrawn by Alex Fischer as a single flowing line and raised in plaster on the walls of Canada Goose stores in Oak Brook, Paris, Milan and Vancouver.
Each wall begins with an artist’s drawing and Alex’s reading of it: what to keep, what to join, how a line can carry the whole picture. NAMARA led the project for Canada Goose; a team of plaster artists, Alex among them, brought the lines out of the walls.
A heartfelt thank you to those who have helped make this art practice possible: family, friends, fabricators, techs, and gallery staff, as well as the generous patronage and support of Donald O’Born, Canada Goose, BNY Mellon, Equitable Bank, Leith Wheeler, Shrigley Battrick, Equinor, TD Bank Group, Natalie MacNamara, The Ontario Arts Council, and many other private collectors and supporters.
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Fischer’s method is based on iterative transformation. Works rarely originate in their final form. Instead, images are constructed through layered digital and physical processes, then translated across formats and scales. Each translation exposes structural relationships that were not previously visible. The work is revised in response to those discoveries, allowing coherence to emerge rather than imposing it.
This process follows a nominalistic logic: meaning is not inherent to any single material or image, but produced through relational positioning. Painting, sculpture, animation, and exhibition are treated as different states of the same underlying investigation. The medium is determined by the structural requirements of the work, not by predefined categories.
Authorship operates as a continuous calibration of relationships. Completion occurs when the internal logic of the work stabilizes and becomes self-sustaining—when it no longer depends on intention to hold together, and its structure remains intact across contexts and time.
Alex Fischer is a shapeshifter. The work develops through transformation. Images and objects are built, translated, and rebuilt across painting, sculpture, animation, publication, and exhibition until they arrive at a form that feels structurally inevitable. These shifts are not changes in style or medium, but stages in the discovery of the work itself. Form is not selected in advance. It is found through the process of moving the work through different creative flows.
This approach is grounded in a relational understanding of meaning. Nothing possesses fixed identity in isolation. Meaning emerges through relationships—between material and image, object and space, scale and perception, viewer and encounter. Each translation reorganizes those relationships, allowing latent structures to surface. The individual artwork is one moment where those structures temporarily stabilize and become visible.
What stabilizes is not a single image, but a coherence between parts. Visual, spatial, and conceptual relationships begin to reinforce one another until the work no longer feels constructed but present. At that point it stops behaving like an intention and starts behaving like an entity. The practice does not seek finality. Each work extends forward, carrying its internal logic into future transformations.