Expect no flash from Stephen Fisher, no canvases of dead insects, no frontal nudity, no puns, no effort to exaggerate, shock, disarm, or confront. Don’t even expect color. Expect instead something so simple and pared down that once you start looking you’ll have a hard time stopping. Fisher draws what (I presume) he sees, and what he chooses to look at — bell jars and hourglasses, globes and darts, fans and compasses — grows interesting not just because he gracefully crowds his varied, meticulously rendered objects onto whistle-clean table tops (they’re like shrines of what’s just come down from the attic) but because the objects themselves make us think about the magic of seeing.
We tend to think of magic as the manifestation of the impossible: the disappearing coin, the disembodied lady, the rabbit that materializes from a top hat. But maybe magic lives much closer to the real world; maybe it’s the dramatization of what we experience every day. Who doesn’t know that fortune is fickle? Who among us don’t leave our bodies behind each night when we sleep? Who hasn’t been startled by a creature that appears out of nowhere?
Stephen Fisher’s form of legerdemain involves placing apparently random objects together on a reflective surface. In all three of his drawings in the intelligent and gratifying exhibit at the Pepper Gallery, that same tiled table top is positioned beside a window. Through the open slats of the window’s venetian blind, horizontal stripes of light ripple on the table’s surface, which itself is making a double of everything it holds. The result is a circus act of shadow and light and refraction. The light also catches and bends in the other reflective surfaces that make up Fisher’s stately, dust-free clutter — the eyeglasses and magnifying lenses, the candy tin and the wind-up toy. Everything is a mirror of everything else, still lifes in which all comes alive in the orchestrated play of light.
The randomness of the objects Fisher draws is actually more sleight of hand. There isn’t an artifact in these frames that couldn’t have been around a century ago: the miniature dirigible, the jumping jacks, the wire-rimmed spectacles, the wooden dart, the glass marble, the map on the globe that balances on its tooled oak pedestal. These pictures suggest a kind of high seriousness (not just for their photographic precision but also for the less identifiable objects that look as if they’d come from an old science lab), but they’re in fact things you’d expect a kid to collect. And not just any kid. The objects of Fisher’s world are either instruments for scientific investigation or toys. The juxtaposition is sobering and even painful: science and play both delight in the imagination, and yet everything we see no longer exists. Gone is the world of these antique wind-up toys, home experiments, uncovered electrical fans. But not entirely. The child who collected these treasures is now the artist who celebrates them in all their light-dappled, thrilling ephemerality.
