Author: Heather White
The world of Alex Fischer's Smarter Today is not ours. For one thing, Fischer doesn't depict our time; his images are appropriated from current sources, but then intricately camouflaged, via a process of digital layering, into compositions of possible futures. Those futures are spacey and pastel, and sparsely peopled with hybrid figures that might approach the monstrous if they didn't veer so resolutely away from categorization.
More than the fast-forwarding of time, though, it's the condensing of space that makes me feel these works as otherworldly. In each giclée print, there's an intriguing sensitivity to texture and depth. There's a tangled push and pull of elements in the scenes that reminds me — however counterintuitively — of John Brown's paintings at Olga Korper. Counterintuitive because, where the painted medium gets grainy, fleshy, material, Fischer's layers are all rendered in the width of veneer. Despite its collaging process and painterly aesthetic, the work exists in the same extreme two-dimensionality as a photograph.
Combined with the futuristic content, the shallowness reads as eerily prophetic: in the future, the world will be flat. Depth will persevere, but only as imagined; texture will be cerebral. Fischer's part whimsical, part haunting world isn't ours because it doesn't seem like it would yield to our three-dimensional selves. And yet it is a world!
Photo credit: Alex Fischer, Three Fates, 2010. Image from oborncontemporary.com.
