New York-based artist Jo Fish navigates a fluid area between figuration and abstraction with poignancy, evoking the identical ambiguity that more and more defines how we expertise and understand the modern world. As every thing turns into digitalized—remodeled into information and data that usually matter greater than the bodily phenomena they signify—the strain between bodily and digital, hand and machine, flesh and digital finds tangible kind in Fish’s work. Her work turn out to be resonant paperwork of our time.
Her newest present, “The Pace of a Pattern,” which not too long ago opened at HdM Gallery in Beijing and closes November 22, presents ten of her most up-to-date works. Displaying them in Beijing makes their that means much more resonant. China’s accelerated modernization has absolutely built-in know-how into on a regular basis life, making it an apt backdrop for Fish’s exploration of what it means to be human amid the entire digitization of expertise.
Freely mixing portray, collage and drawing, Fish has developed a hybrid visible language that is still anchored in questions on portray as a medium able to translating actuality and thru which the very sense of actuality turns into the problem itself. On the core of her follow lies an inquiry not solely into the opportunity of illustration however into what stays of the human physique after centuries of artwork, science and know-how have reshaped how we see and conceive it. As Vilém Flusser as soon as recommended, photographs within the technical age are not home windows to the world however packages that reconfigure our notion of it. This notion finds a quiet echo in Fish’s painterly experiments.
Ultimately, her work visualizes the passage of time and the evolution of inventive thought from the Renaissance to the current, fusing conventional approach with digital instruments to confront the relentless circulation of photographs in trendy society and what stays of their that means in relation to our worldview.
“Loads of my approach—how I land on issues—may be very painting-focused. So in some ways, I’m portray about portray, exploring the approach itself,” Fish advised Observer earlier than the exhibition’s opening whereas she was nonetheless engaged on this new sequence.
It’s notably intriguing that Fish approaches portray, figuration and the human physique by the bodily consciousness formed by her background as a gymnast. On her conceptually and technically layered canvases, the physique is disassembled, contorted, patched collectively and stretched into unattainable gestures. Some works resemble research in anatomy however push past the boundaries of human kind, presenting anatomies of one thing greater than human.
Her figures are stripped to their necessities, diminished to stylized frameworks that resist individualization. For Fish, that is probably the most attention-grabbing manner to consider portray in a world the place mastery is not outlined by hyperrealism. “There are countless methods to make a ravishing portray—you’ll be able to layer, splash, pour—however I’m extra enthusiastic about interrogating the medium itself: the paint, its materiality, its historical past and its future,” she mentioned.
Resonating with Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and Rosi Braidotti’s writing on the posthuman topic, Fish’s painted our bodies turn out to be extra like an interface between natural life and technological extension. As if her figures had been flickering onto a display screen, she isn’t afraid to depart clean area. “I’m truly extra afraid of overworking a chunk,” she admitted. The black void turns into a website of risk, suggesting the unseen actions a determine may make.
Equally fascinating is her course of. Fish makes use of A.I. as a collaborator in producing imagery. “I’ve been having these philosophical conversations with it—asking A.I. in regards to the historical past of portray and the way it sees the longer term,” she mentioned. “It truly provides me very particular solutions, which it then codes.”
Fish’s work can thus be learn as visible aggregations of those exchanges. The printed patterns embedded in her compositions are literal codes, translations of A.I.’s imaginative and prescient for the way forward for portray. “I combine these codes into my work. Every one comes from a unique dialog. I’m truly coding the portray itself,” she famous.
Her strategy operates as a post-structuralist reflection on figuration and, extra broadly, on the construction of actuality: how we understand, translate and talk it by photographs and symbols. On the similar time, Fish carries these questions into the technological age, testing the interaction of hand and machine, analog and digital, as a viable manner for portray to exist meaningfully in a data-driven world.
This need to query physicality and the materiality of the physique, and the various surrogates people have created to grapple with this dilemma, is mirrored within the mannequins that populate her studio and generally seem in her work. “I wished to distinction the way in which I draw figures with one thing very standardized, like a model,” she defined. “Inserting them facet by facet lets me discover a sort of norm versus an actual mark. I like that distinction: the right profile, the right nostril, with every thing idealized versus the imperfection of drawing.”
She additionally works with 3D-modeling software program that enables her to pose generic digital figures. “I turned interested in their origin,” she added. “Once you take a look at these 3D figures, they’re actually not so totally different from mannequins. That connection fascinated me.”
On this sense, Fish’s follow emerges from a relentless investigation into the framework of not solely illustration but additionally the simulation of human presence in a totally digitalized world. Her works inhabit the area the place the picture ceases to signify and begins to simulate, recalling Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, a actuality that not wants the actual. “I’m keen about artwork historical past, however I additionally need to take into consideration how portray can evolve,” she mentioned. “In fact, I nonetheless need the work to be lovely, however I’m additionally eager about the resilience of portray—what it means to maintain it alive within the age of knowledge.” Emotional and sensorial layers complicate the obvious flatness of the canvas, revealing a tactile presence that may solely be absolutely perceived in particular person.
“I wished to discover a technique to create texture with out truly portray it,” she mentioned. “That ties into every thing I’ve been eager about: the mechanical, the procedural.” Her work are consequently hyper-physical. The way in which she manipulates shade and floor makes them vibrate with a sensory rigidity, regardless of their minimal, digital aesthetic. The feel itself embodies time, labor and sensation, stretching and folding throughout layers of pigment in what Henri Bergson described as period, an elastic continuum of notion and reminiscence.
In her constantly ambivalent and fluid engagement with know-how—handing over management whilst she reasserts painterly company—Fish extends the Duchampian and Warholian problem to authorship and the rejection of the artist’s hand. “Warhol’s disruption wasn’t simply conceptual—it was in regards to the course of itself, about making the act of portray mechanical,” she displays.
Right here, Fish’s work turns into a vital experiment in what portray and imagery can nonetheless be within the age of algorithmically pushed sense of actuality, an effort to articulate a brand new phenomenology of the liminal area between digital and actual. On this, she gestures towards what Gilbert Simondon termed the technical individuation of the picture, the place notion, information and matter converge into new hybrid beings. Her works don’t merely depict the posthuman, data-saturated situation, they enact it. By means of their coded textures and sensorial cost, they invite a rethinking of notion itself that acknowledges, as Byung-Chul Han warns, the exhaustion of expertise within the digital age and but resists it by embodied seeing.
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