NAMARA Projects

Natalie MacNamara
Principal & Creative Director, NAMARA

I have been witnessing Alex Fischer’s practice throughout their professional career. Technology has always been instrumental to the artist’s process and its impact is evident in the content of resulting printed works. Fischer addresses narratives around technological production, online personhood, and digital authorship. These remain significant to the artist’s practice and hold new consequence in the age of tokenized digital art.

Equally important are the tethers Fischer maintains to traditional art and in particular, conventions of painting. The artist employs myriad digital brushstrokes. Textures, palettes and implied hand are sampled from historical and contemporary works alike. Fischer amalgamates manifold style, resulting in one that is undeniably their own. The artist’s oeuvre is in tension with itself. Seemingly unwilling to give in to digital tropes, visual language is neither a challenge nor concession to prevailing digital modes of artmaking.

Unlike previous series, collections or exhibitions, Art Show brings The Body to the fore. Dynamism characterizes youthful bodies, absorbed into their surroundings–or maybe not. Perhaps the figures are in fact emerging from their conditions. Are these scenes of struggle or performance? Are these avatars labouring within the digital space in which they were conceived–Seeking to separate, or at least to distinguish form from matter?

Fischer does not provide an answer. They embrace the “hybrid and fluid nature of things.” The artist plays with convention and embraces uncertainty. They point to the humanity in digital space without succumbing to it. Even in the more abstract compositions, the audience recognizes certain reflections: Eyes, limbs, movement, and flesh are present but more or less entwined with place.

Disentangling is work for the viewer.