Smarter Today
- October 28, 2010, 6–9pm — Opening Reception
- October 30, 2010, 2–4pm — Artist Book Launch and In-Gallery Conversation with Alex Fischer and Noel Rodo-Vankeulen
- Three Fates , 2010, 60 x 92 inches, matte giclée, ed. /3
- Cookes Cape , 2010, 84 x 60 inches, archival giclée, ed. /3
- Figure Head , 2010, 57 x 55 inches, matte giclée, ed. /5
- The Invisible Man Returns , 2010, 48 x 32 inches, matte giclée, ed. /5
- Good Grief , 2010, 82 x 60 inches, matte giclée, ed. /10
- Bring Home the Bacon , 2010, 36 x 48 inches, ed. /10
- Artists Retreat , 2010, 48 x 44 inches, ed. /10
- Trouble on Volcano Sundae , 2010, 48 x 44 inches, ed. /10
- Teen Dream , 2010, 11 x 10 inches, matte giclée, ed. /15
- Fungus Philosopher , 2010, 9 x 8 inches, matte giclée, ed. /15
- Monster Mash , 2010, 9 x 8 inches, matte giclée, ed. /15
- Dweller , 2010, 11 x 10 inches, matte giclée
- Untitled Greens , 2010, 15 x 20 inches, matte giclée
- Grandfather Wreath , with base
- Knight
Smarter Today is neither an optimist or pessimist. It offers a human view of futurist landscapes, a view exploring the ideologies and projections of contemporary society. The human landscape is fallible and susceptible to weaknesses.
Alex Fischer creates human landscapes and portraits with respect to a fundamental question of art: "How can we represent the present?" His response is to investigate the ideologies and projections of contemporary society.
The advancement of machine generations has vastly outpaced the human lifespan. People have no idea what the world will be like in 20, 100, or 1000 years. Keeping in mind that our ideas of the future are the quickest ideas to fade, Fischer conglomerates a variety of sources to provide an illustration of human potential, while maintaining consideration of human nature, and individual circumstance.
Core Concepts
Human beings are susceptible to weaknesses. Being able to recognize difference incites imagination. Being able to recognize pattern incites reason. Empathizing with the recognition of pattern incites reason.
The general consistency in the work is psychological, social, and physical sustainability. The way to go about exploring this is by learning from others — through the filter of his own state and action, looking at and referencing what people make, how they sustain it, and the reasons why they do it.
Keywords
Syncretism: the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.
Post-structuralism: generally views the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united (in direct contrast to the structuralist claim of an independent signifier superior to the signified).
Theoretical References
"Why should there be content?" — Sartre argues that "The environment can act on the subject only to the exact extent that he comprehends it; that is, transforms it into a situation." We can suggest that the environment is turned into a situation, not by knowing, not by comprehending the environment, but by acting within it. A plausible goal would be for the creation of situations and actions which reflect upon memory and past experience.
General Ideas
The Landscape: The scene's organic, natural quality is a lure, and the detective's task is to denature it by first discovering the inconspicuous details that stick out, that do not fit in the frame of the surface image.
The femme fatale: She who ruins the lives of men and is at the same time victim of her own lust for enjoyment, obsessed by a desire for power, who endlessly manipulates her partners and is at the same time slave to some third ambiguous person. What bestows on her an aura of mystery is precisely the way she cannot be clearly located in the opposition between master and slave.
The arena: One of the key scenes in Hitchcock's Saboteur, the charity dance in the palace of the wealthy Nazi spy posing as a society lady, demonstrates perfectly the way the very superficiality of the big Other (the field of etiquette, social rules, and manners) remains a place where truth is determined and thus the place from which the game is run.
Favouring iconology to iconography: Even though he may have his own ideas in mind when composing something, the signifier is ambiguous and open to interpretation.
Collected Quotations
- "I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes."
- "In network theory, a node's relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks."
- "Information is an activity. Information is a life form. Information is a relationship. Information is a verb not a noun. Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space."
- "Somewhere between abstraction and figuration."
- "The source of the new is the random."
- "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
- "The human mind delights in finding pattern — so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it."
- "The object becomes virtual, the image actual."
- "The starships of the future exploring the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical — the engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us — the possibility of walking into the constructs of the imagination."
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