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PRESS RELEASE
Vernon Fisher
Brainiac
October 11 through November 8, 2003
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Vernon Fisher. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Saturday, October 11, 2003 from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. The artist will be present for the opening, and the exhibition will continue through Saturday, November 8, 2003.
True to Fisher’s body of work, the current exhibition is demanding; eliciting both an emotional and an intellectual response from the viewer. Fisher’s work has always contained cerebral elements such as language transfer and the impact of memory on visual exploration. Long known for the inclusion of text in his work, Fisher now dispenses with actual text allowing the image itself to function as the narrative. As the only syntax that remains, punctuation, the lowest common denominator of the written word is elevated to exalted status.
Brainiac consists of a tumultuous array of large-scale installations and paintings containing graphic elements, renderings from comic strips, and other common sources usually set off with punctuation. Storms of the mind play out on the gallery walls as various images swirl around a line drawing of the artist’s skull and nearby palm trees bend to the will of gale force winds. Fisher delights in the cognitive tension that ensues from depicting elements of the Euclidian Universe alongside the fractal. The paintings challenge the viewer to investigate various models of consciousness and decipher meaning from both the image and his seemingly arbitrary use of punctuation. He literally plays cat and mouse with the viewer in a work of the same name, which depicts a stylized, highly pixilated image of a tiger alongside the instantly recognizable feet of that most famous mouse, Mickey. In another work, a beautifully rendered painting of a B-17 bomber trails a chain of debris including a comma and a cartoon thought balloon cloud that linger below the craft. Fisher’s interest lies in the string of associations made by these disparate objects that seem to defy categorization and raise questions about resolution and closure. What is present in these images is as important as what is left out. In this recent body of work Fisher’s images succeed in coercing the viewer to actively participate by creating a personal syntax.
A native of Fort Worth, Vernon Fisher is undeniably one of Texas’ most acclaimed artists. His work has been shown in major museum exhibitions of contemporary American art, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others. Fisher was also honored with a mid-career, traveling exhibition organized by the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. He was the first Texas artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fisher has received multiple fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Fisher was also included in the prestigious 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Please contact Elizabeth Phy at the gallery for additional information or to request visuals. Dunn and Brown Contemporary is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 until 5:00 and by appointment.