Sasha Fishman
Resurrectura
Nov 9–Feb 23, 2024
Info–
Words by
Kristina Stallvik
Resurrectura, Sasha Fishman’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles, engages with sites of transcorporeality to trouble the assumptions embedded within a rigid taxonomy of species classification. Disgust, pleasure, identification, and desire commingle within the interstices of both Fishman’s material structures and the interspecies encounters they speak of. For half a year, Fishman raised hagfish – deep sea eels without vertebrae – at her studio in East LA. In a thesis statement, she writes:
Five fish once changed me. We saw each other every other day. I felt comfort from them; I will never know what they felt from me. I wanted to be in the water with them. When the fish departed, I did my best to keep their bodies warm.
During routine tank cleanings, suspended flurries of sloughed-off skin cells, human and fish alike, danced together in the darkened water.
The works on view, produced during two years of Fishman’s MFA at Columbia University, are themselves a byproduct of such collisions with aquatic bodies. Informed by sustained sensory observation of living organisms, Fishman enacts intensive processes of physical transformation: egg yolk tanning, corrosive drano soaking, freeze drying, propagating living mycelium, preserving both marine creatures and inanimate objects in resin and copper. This anti-disciplinary approach to fabrication simultaneously positions fish as both subject and medium within her corpus. Fishman’s manipulation of the deceased, non-human body does not shy away from the absurd – expressing her longing for an intimacy capable of traversing species through the gruesome disassembly of organ, flesh and skin required to embalm. This understanding of the body as a process (the literal production of a post-structuralist “body without organs”) is an almost erotic act of reverence, as well as an admission of the volatility contained within any consequential relationship.
I Want To Be Wet – a seven channel video installation depicting the life of a salmon hatched through artificial insemination at a recreational fishing arena in upstate New York – comprises monitors held by a structure of Douglas Fir lined with preserved salmon skin. Fish leather is adhered to the wood with a rough concoction of fish scales, collagen, organs, cartilage, marshmallow, beer, and salt. The two materials are transfixed through surface texture, the “glue” creating a tight bond by filling the craters of their similarly porous contours. The work’s resulting form, resembling both the skeleton of a whale and a derelict ship, exemplifies colloquial ascriptions of the Leviathan – an undifferentiated reference to monster and vehicle. Occupying a similarly ambiguous location between human, animal, and inert object, the recurrent “I” in Fishman’s titles (Some days I’m edible, When it’s humid I melt, If you trap me will I ever dry out) understands itself as a subject only through the perpetual instability of interspecies exchange. I’m hypersensitive to blue – an analogous wooden ship reinforced with fiberglass to form the semi-transparent basin of a fountain – acts as an unlikely vessel. The apparent role reversal of a boat’s embedded function draws attention to the hull itself as a contested threshold between interior and exterior. This zone of contact recurs throughout the visual language of Resurrectura, appearing again as the epidermis, the oral cavity, or the shifting tectonic fissures of a mineral hot spring.
Fishman’s protean reassembly of organic matter centers not only a discursive, but also a material, investment in penetrability. Her arrangements of clear substrates – water, mummified fish, (both natural and synthetic) plastics – suggest translucency as a model for the permeability of transcorporeal embodiment. Decoupled from its slew of nominal suffixes, trans- (meaning simply, “across” or “beyond”) gestures towards an emergent and undetermined movement. The trans- corporeal self might desire to be moved in such spatial and affective ways, embracing the violability both between and within bodies. Fishman’s “flowforms,” And don’t stop your body cavitations and Hearing Dryness Longing for Wetness, provide a shape for this non-linear movement: the cascading, looping, sloshing, dripping of water through 3D printed and ceramic cavities. These multimodal structures perform a rejection of the fixity associated with a dry terrain, instead allowing water a furtive, and perhaps erosive, exploration of their recesses. The vitality of liquid viscosity is channeled through an intimate proximity with uranium glass, nickel, and paper pulp, visualizing the unarrestable motion of hydro-topographies. Taken together, the figurations that comprise Resurrectura remind us of the illusory value ascribed to the bounded individual, species, medium, and epistemological system. Addressing the everyday discontinuities of interspecies entanglement, they turn towards a marginal acrossness, embracing the messiness, joy, and discomfort of bodies in motion.
Five fish once changed me. We saw each other every other day. I felt comfort from them; I will never know what they felt from me. I wanted to be in the water with them. When the fish departed, I did my best to keep their bodies warm.
During routine tank cleanings, suspended flurries of sloughed-off skin cells, human and fish alike, danced together in the darkened water.
The works on view, produced during two years of Fishman’s MFA at Columbia University, are themselves a byproduct of such collisions with aquatic bodies. Informed by sustained sensory observation of living organisms, Fishman enacts intensive processes of physical transformation: egg yolk tanning, corrosive drano soaking, freeze drying, propagating living mycelium, preserving both marine creatures and inanimate objects in resin and copper. This anti-disciplinary approach to fabrication simultaneously positions fish as both subject and medium within her corpus. Fishman’s manipulation of the deceased, non-human body does not shy away from the absurd – expressing her longing for an intimacy capable of traversing species through the gruesome disassembly of organ, flesh and skin required to embalm. This understanding of the body as a process (the literal production of a post-structuralist “body without organs”) is an almost erotic act of reverence, as well as an admission of the volatility contained within any consequential relationship.
I Want To Be Wet – a seven channel video installation depicting the life of a salmon hatched through artificial insemination at a recreational fishing arena in upstate New York – comprises monitors held by a structure of Douglas Fir lined with preserved salmon skin. Fish leather is adhered to the wood with a rough concoction of fish scales, collagen, organs, cartilage, marshmallow, beer, and salt. The two materials are transfixed through surface texture, the “glue” creating a tight bond by filling the craters of their similarly porous contours. The work’s resulting form, resembling both the skeleton of a whale and a derelict ship, exemplifies colloquial ascriptions of the Leviathan – an undifferentiated reference to monster and vehicle. Occupying a similarly ambiguous location between human, animal, and inert object, the recurrent “I” in Fishman’s titles (Some days I’m edible, When it’s humid I melt, If you trap me will I ever dry out) understands itself as a subject only through the perpetual instability of interspecies exchange. I’m hypersensitive to blue – an analogous wooden ship reinforced with fiberglass to form the semi-transparent basin of a fountain – acts as an unlikely vessel. The apparent role reversal of a boat’s embedded function draws attention to the hull itself as a contested threshold between interior and exterior. This zone of contact recurs throughout the visual language of Resurrectura, appearing again as the epidermis, the oral cavity, or the shifting tectonic fissures of a mineral hot spring.
Fishman’s protean reassembly of organic matter centers not only a discursive, but also a material, investment in penetrability. Her arrangements of clear substrates – water, mummified fish, (both natural and synthetic) plastics – suggest translucency as a model for the permeability of transcorporeal embodiment. Decoupled from its slew of nominal suffixes, trans- (meaning simply, “across” or “beyond”) gestures towards an emergent and undetermined movement. The trans- corporeal self might desire to be moved in such spatial and affective ways, embracing the violability both between and within bodies. Fishman’s “flowforms,” And don’t stop your body cavitations and Hearing Dryness Longing for Wetness, provide a shape for this non-linear movement: the cascading, looping, sloshing, dripping of water through 3D printed and ceramic cavities. These multimodal structures perform a rejection of the fixity associated with a dry terrain, instead allowing water a furtive, and perhaps erosive, exploration of their recesses. The vitality of liquid viscosity is channeled through an intimate proximity with uranium glass, nickel, and paper pulp, visualizing the unarrestable motion of hydro-topographies. Taken together, the figurations that comprise Resurrectura remind us of the illusory value ascribed to the bounded individual, species, medium, and epistemological system. Addressing the everyday discontinuities of interspecies entanglement, they turn towards a marginal acrossness, embracing the messiness, joy, and discomfort of bodies in motion.
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Sasha Fishman is a NY based sculptor and researcher. She is particularly interested in marine biomaterials, toxicology and energy harvesting as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. She is a recent MFA Sculpture graduate from Columbia University where she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. Sasha is a 2024 Puffins Grant recipient and a current Artist in Residence at Smack Mellon.
Fishman has exhibited her work at Below Grand (New York), Resort (Maryland), Hesse Flatow (New York), Bozomag (Los Angeles), ILY2 (Portland), The Jewish Museum (New York), and The Indian Ceramics Triennale (New Delhi, India). She has participated in residencies at Smack Mellon (New York), Art Ichol (India), Acre (Wisconsin), NAHR (Italy) and the High Desert Observatory (California). Fishman has presented her work and run workshops at Printed Matter (New York), Genspace (New York), Navel (Los Angeles), UCLA (Los Angeles), UDenver (Colorado), UColorado Boulder (Colorado), Kenyon College (Ohio), MICA (Maryland), Caltech (California), and CSULB (California).
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Photos by Josh Schaedel
