Implosion Paradigm Incoming

Sasha Fishman

September 16 - October 21, 2023

Press:

The Brooklyn Rail, Qingyuan Deng.

It may be easiest to start with an issue of language. The word studio is a modern word. Developed in the late 18th century, it evokes images of isolated study; the hidden lofts of bohemian artists. For Sasha Fishman’s practice, the Renaissance workshop feels more adequate; a more comprehensive definition to better describe the dimensionality of her multivalent practice. It is a space of process, a site of thinking through, the instant enacting of mind through hands and body. It was the space of the expansive word designo–an unstructured realm that shifted between disciplines and roles where the artist acted as designer, dreamer, technician, and inventor. In Fishman’s workshop, disciplines merge like tributaries of research and aesthetics that link to the histories of Da Vinci, Moholy-Nagy and others who in their space attempted to better visualize the waking world through the spaces left open within dreams, optics, and invention. 

When I first met Sasha, she was collecting the secretions of hagfish from fish tanks in her studio. When startled, hagfish expel a fibrous substance that can be used to reinforce hard-formed bio-based materials that have similar capabilities to plastics. She now works at Columbia’s Prentis Hall, a site used for research during the Manhattan Project in the Upper West Side on 125th street, where she has focused her research on new bio and earth-based materials. Ranging from sculpting with mycelium (mushroom roots) to developing ceramic glazes from volcanic hot springs, Fishman engages with materials that exist and grow in depths beyond human words; gathering each material over from the other side. This research takes her beyond the confines of the studio expectations of the market-driven art world, and often finds her navigating the tensions between scientific research and artistic collaboration, developing dreamspace within the spaces they overlap. Skill sharing is an important aspect of her practice. She has worked with several University labs at Columbia and Caltech to collaborate with scientists and has been commissioned by BMW and Spira to produce new bioplastics.  Sasha has utilized their networks and funding to extend this knowledge of materials to a larger public through workshops and collaborations with other artists. 

Sasha has developed her sculpture practice within a larger working theory of systems that categorize the world along a spectrum of wet and dry. Acting as both a paradigm and a methodology, wet is the cosmic fluidity–the capability of forms to avoid the densities of convention through vibrant strategies of adaptation and spectral logic. It is mysterious, and can take the forms of biological material, magnetic attractions, ideas, or time itself. Dry is inert matter; stable and unchanging. It is the reliable scaffolding and structure that allows for the flux of wet. Some materials drift between these poles. Plastic is dry as a static material, but as it breaks down into microplastics it’s more temperamental. Its wet characteristics take hold. 

Fishman’s sculptures utilize both wet and dry intelligences to investigate the ways of seeing inscribed by the authoritative gaze of laboratories and design firms; challenging the shape and form that future technologies will take. As an artist, Fishman is able to engage with the ambivalent thresholds of science and pseudoscience. Her practice combs through bio machines and natural mechanics, where vibrant textures form internets of living organisms–powered by skeletons and the excess that is shed and left behind. Her fountains often take on the spindly architectures of stalactites and stalagmites, of karst-dremelled grottoes, of sporous desert basins, of the spines of fish churning deep within oceanic waves. It is a language that mimics to understand the slow markings of time on the landscape–the interactions of wet mechanics and dry permanence that reveal the topologies of reality and material essence. Fishman’s wunderkammer offers a parallel world, where shells and mussels are replaced with defamiliarized architectures; able to achieve the uncanny tension between fabricated reality, relic, and nature lab. In this parallel, water acts as both medium and muse. Tanned salmon skins and mycelium ladders form biological shadows of fountains and nymphaeum, fish dams, and whirlpools. The spindles and husks ask- what futures are left to us? These spired and tendriled worlds mimic zoological finds; mirroring and distancing the textures of mollusks, shells, anthropods, crustaceans and spirulina. These mimetic moments are made to futurecast an infrathin habitat. It is a world of architecture and tools that carry impulses and attractions between objects in ways that we can know them.

Fishman’s combination of these static substances with vital mass generates flexible circuits of living and inert substances. Her structures are open systems, where active and dead material mingle to grow and die, leaving unpredictable traces of matter incised on the surface. This dark ecology of husk and spore is an important motif of her aesthetic–where dead material is reconstituted to pose as batteries and new sites of origin and generation. It is a type of undeading, where materials and decoys of living matter pantomime greater capacities to facilitate life.  Her materials shed skin and change hue through their proximity. They murmur deeper time. As each material adapts and  responds to its environment, it builds an active system, a worlding of exo- and endoskeletons that adapt and react within materials and objects–a whispering of shadowed animacy. Her sculptures are fingerprinted with other world tactility, marked by the higher intelligence of the natural world–one where biologics have replaced the overwhelming mining of fossil fuels and natural resources. Each material flickers with indiscernible consciousness. 

For Implosion Paradigm Incoming, Fishman has made the pseudoscience and conspiracy theories of the internet into pataphysical and surrealist exploration. The unseen forces of attraction and affect between us are articulated in the reality of magnetic fields and the fringe belief in orgone energy. The invisible energies of our world require belief. Where do the boundaries of distinction between animism and energy fields lie? The suspicion of sympathetic magic runs over. The growing public interest in both feels connected to the whispers of post-human knowledge; a search for something metaphysical that connects us in ways we feel that we are missing. The spiritualist and their return to the earth finds common ground with the paranoia of social media, capable of extinguishing the boundaries between reality and conspiracy, where 5G towers and vaccines amass strange effects; where bodies carry current and attract spoons; where sea creatures pose as alien life forms; where the past is visited by ancient aliens and somehow offer a clearer picture than the natural world is able to produce. An older world is breaking through. Water and its mysteries are sought by seekers of internet forums and environmentalists, tracing paths of anima mundi into the bedrock by the stream.

Fishman’s ongoing interest in fountains has developed into her current research that navigates the possibilities between the fountain and the vortex. In 1980, fifteen years before Sasha was born, a massive sinkhole opened up in Lake Peigneur in Louisiana. It was a disaster of cause and effect, a sinkhole that was caused by the collision of two extraction efforts– an oil company drilling into a salt mine operation below.  An ocean opened up within a lake, a physical act of oblivion and water erasing itself. The water knows both the infinite and its imminent unraveling, a remembering of what once was and what may be. It is a darkly beautiful rift that now unfurls, a portal’s edge that spreads and opens at our feet.

–Andrew Woolbright