One thing that I find frustrating is that there isn’t enough newsprint (or time) to write about people whose work that I like and respect. I just hope that others will notice too. In this case, Gilbert A. Bouchard from the Edmonton Journal wrote this great review of Halifax painter Stephen Fisher’s show. Read and enjoy
VISIONS OF UTOPIABy Gilbert A. BouchardEdmonton JournalJanuary 19, 2007, F9No (Such) Place, Stephen Fisher’s show at Latitude 53, explores our complicated cultural and personal attitudes towards geographic “place” via playful but elegant drawings of imagined land masses, utopias of a sort, floating and explosively colliding in space.
Fisher’s cleanly drafted flying places are inspired by low-brow comic-book and science-fiction drawings of flying cities such as the space city Argo or the bottle city of Kandor in Superman comics, as well as more prosaic and rarefied illustrations of cutaway land masses cribbed from science textbooks.While totally over the top and impossible, the floating lands depicted in his seven drawings (six medium-sized works on paper and one large wall-based drawing) underline perfectly the literal definition of utopia (“no place”) that he references in the title of his show.He makes his oddball floating utopias more physically impossible than even a comic book city-in-space, but totally grounded in the reality of a science textbook. In doing so, Fisher forces the viewer to explore the very underpinnings of how we construct wildly different and often conflicting ideas of “place” at both individual and societal levels.By going to high- and low-brow extremes in his references for his drawings, Fisher also forces the viewer to make an intellectual connection between the two: namely, that each extreme is just as imagined and fictional as the other.While a floating space-city is obviously an imagined “no place” that will never exist, a utopian long-range city neighbourhood plan or a 19th-century vision of a “garden city” is as imaginary and just as “no place” as its science-fiction counterpart. The city plan may boast slightly more veracity, but this idealized city, too, can never be built exactly as conceived and therefore lives on only in the imagination.
Image credit: Stephen Fisher, “No Place.” Latitude 53, “ProjEX” , Jan12-Feb 10. Wall painting/drawing, plus six 24″x36″ drawings on paper, arranged in a grid of 3 over 3.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2007.