Cryptic Clutter -- March 16 - April 23
Crickett Fisher
I am a maker of paintings, drawings, prints, and occasionally other things. With my still life artwork I aim to breathe magic and mystery into inanimate objects, animating them with the dreamlike – or nightmarish – hallucinatory vividness of childhood’s imagination. Whimsical or unsettling, to me these scenes evoke a world in which things wait silently to spring to life when your back is turned. These images confront the picture plane, closing in on the viewer like the nonsensical space of dreams. Some are more traditionally discernible, while others are distorted through layers of light, mirrors, and madcap photo editing.
Presented in this way, these objects become a convenient façade for illustrating internal emotional experiences and sensations that defy verbalization. A horseshoe crab and a dusty baby doll embrace, held together tenuously by a string of pearls. Detached doll heads tumble through an electric purple void. A peony headed doll lies belly up before the Virgin Mary. I cannot deny allegations of symbolism in these pseudo-figural tableaus. They are riddles as much as they are psychedelic explorations of light and color.
Crickett Fisher was born in Providence, Rhode Island in late May 2003. This makes her a Gemini, which, if one subscribes to such superstitions, likely predisposes her to being an artist (two-faced tricksters who arrogantly try their hand at the divine act of creation). She grew up in Warren, Rhode Island in a house sized Wunderkammer among cats (symbolic of mischief) and art (symbolic of a genetic predisposition to overvaluing the mechanism of sight). She has always loved to draw, leading her to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in printmaking at Rhode Island College, where she studies under the illustrious print wizard Stephen Fisher. She intends to pursue a Master of Fine Arts.
Stephen Fisher
Common to all my still-life drawings and is an obsession with intense perceptual rigor, compositional manipulation, the viscosity of light, and the tactile, sensual nature of drawing materials.
Objects are generally chosen and assembled with their allusive characteristics in mind, and carefully staged to produce a directed, evocative situation (a sort of implied narrative). Like a dream within a dream, the situation is concrete and familiar, yet transitory and unsettled, hopefully transforming the mundane world into a magical or poetic moment.
Yet on the most basic level the images are just so much dirt on paper. The tactile presence of material compulsively manipulated is perhaps the only real part of this realism.
Stephen Fisher was born in 1954 in Sunbury, Pa. and spent much of his childhood moving as a classic “army brat”. The semi-official beginning of his artistic career can be traced to a deal with his parents in the seventh grade, agreeing to give up the trumpet in favor of correspondence school art lessons. He is, in fact, an actual graduate of the Famous Artists School. After false starts in interior design and architecture, Fisher earned a B.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (1976) and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Yale University (1981). He resumed his traveling ways as an academic gypsy, teaching at five colleges in eight years before settling in at Rhode Island College in Providence as a Professor of Art where he specializes in printmaking and drawing, and aspires to the title of “Chief Printmaking Wizard.”
Fisher’s work has been exhibited in a variety of national and, occasionally, international venues and earned numerous awards in a wide range of competitions. His drawings and prints can be found in numerous public, corporate and private collections. Public recognition of Fisher’s efforts include a regional N.E.A. Fellowship, three Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships and a Graphic Media Achievement Award from American Artist Magazine.