Ghost Town Andreas Fischer Gahlberg Gallery College of DuPage 425 Fawell Blvd. Glen Ellyn, IL 60137- 6599 www.cod.edu/gallery (630) 942-2321 College of DuPage Ghost Town Andreas Fischer Gahlberg Gallery Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago Jan. 21 to Feb. 27, 2010 Jan. 17 to April 18, 2010 Ghost Town address this absence. Through material of skin is conveyed through mottled strokes facts of paint these bodies of images of pink, gray and green, giving some of the As any good horror story demonstrates, attempt to extend beyond basic linguistic figures a distinctly zombielike appearance. there are consequences to reanimating the representation into broader experience. So too do their eyes, which Fischer often dead. Or at least, there should be. Ghosts, conveys with a few strokes of brown or zombies, vampires and other creatures “Both bodies of work are meant to mimic black so that the sockets appear as gaping from the realm of the beyond have earned kinds of historical fragments. They pretend hollows. A single curved brushstroke may their uncanny badges in part because they to document. More importantly, though, evoke a pair of pursed lips, a slackened take the form of someone who was once they attempt to use paint activity to tap jaw or other facial grimace that hints recognizably human, coursing with blood into imaginative characteristics that make at a quality that is somehow essential to and feeling. Yet not for a moment can such up subjective experience.” the character, and yet other areas of the creatures be mistaken for the people they composition will be more crudely evoked once were. The apparition hovering in the No matter what form history takes, there or purposefully underdeveloped, thereby mist may look a little like grandpa, the will always be aspects of experience that are breaking the illusion of coherency and psychic may give voice to a dead aunt’s omitted from the official narratives because referring us back to the raw materiality of cherished childhood memories, the vampire they don’t fit the trajectory or are considered paint as a representational device. inevitably wears stylish street clothes, but Sheriff Henry Plummer irrelevant. Fischer wants to figuratively there is something fundamentally wrong with gather up these stray parts, these shadow We have the distinct sense that these all of them: They are not who they appear at the Hyde Park Art Center and the stories, and use them as the inspiration for individuals are posing for a photographer to be. Despite all this our culture remains Gahlberg Gallery at College of DuPage paintings that are in no way historical and rather than a portrait painter. The fascinated with ghost stories and other tales consist of two separate but conceptually yet rely on the suggestive power of historical unintentional facial grimaces, the of the undead, because we want to know related groups of paintings. The first, titled fragments to make meaning. No doubt momentary twitch or droop of an eyelid – what these strange new/old creatures know. Original Location, is a series of landscapes there is something vaguely Frankensteinian these are all imperfections that most We want to believe. depicting various Montana settings. in Fischer’s attempts to assemble images portrait painters would take care to erase The second, titled Sunday Best, consists of human beings from bits and parts. but that the photographer has no choice Original Location, 2009, oil on canvas, 16" x 22" In many ways, Andreas Fischer’s recent of portraits based on found tintype (also (The same could be said of the historian’s but to record. Fischer’s paint applications paintings can be understood as ghost stories known as ferrotype) images of anonymous efforts to construct historical narratives out also mimic the visual cloudiness and surface This exhibition catalog contains a historical the sketchy details that history has provided? told with paint. Each of his works attempts individuals dressed in 19th century-style attire. of disparate archival materials.) discolorations of unretouched tintypes. account of Bannack, MT, written by Kathy So too may we wish to invest Fischer’s to represent imaginative experiences that He is especially skillful when using paint to Weiser. Bannack was a territory that thrived characters with qualities that exceed the cannot be conveyed linguistically, often Fischer draws on metaphors of historiography The personal and historical identities of capture the apparitional qualities of the wet for a few brief years during the Gold Rush boundaries of the canvas. The Sunday Best by taking the form of something they are and the archive to explain how these two the individuals in Fischer’s portraits have plate process, in which certain elements era and is now a ghost town. Populated by characters are all of a type that could have not, be it a faded archival photograph bodies of work relate to one another: eroded over time. Backgrounds composed appear hazy or obscure while others seem outlaw gangs, a crooked sheriff, a prison lived in Bannack, although Fischer’s paintings or a snapshot of a picturesque Montana “History often gets represented through of bright blue, garish orange or lime green preternaturally sharp. As Fischer explains, escapee-turned saloon proprietor and a are not, in fact, portraits of Bannack residents. landscape. Using paint to weave together a collection of fragments or an archive appear to hold these subjects in place while “there is a partial purging of original schoolteacher named Lucia Darling (have But couldn’t they be? Like the now-defunct the factual and the ineffable, Fischer and it has been argued that what is also gnawing away at their outlines, so that context and then a re-creation” of it. “The you any doubts she was young and pretty?), HBO series Deadwood, which presented a provides us with information that cannot important in archives is what is left out – both the figure and ground appear to be older referent [the subject of the tintype] Bannack’s brief but tumultuous history is heavily fictionalized version of real historical be confirmed by a source outside of the what can’t be represented factually, actual disintegrating before our eyes. These people is pushed away by paint and through its animated by the reader’s imagination. events that took place during the Gold Rush painting: Meaning must be intuited via the experience in other words. Both parts of are an unsettling combination of living suggestive possibilities paint helps to invent How can we not be tempted to construct era in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the paint itself. Fischer’s concurrent exhibitions Ghost Town attempt to use painting to character and dead things. The ruddiness a newer character.” dramatic plotlines for these people beyond characters in Fischer’s paintings serve as - 2 - - 3 - the ‘original locations’ for these paintings. something about the way a mark is made All the elements are there: the big sky, the that is an opening up, a complication that snow-covered mountains, the lake and its produces something else.” Fischer insists fragmented reflections of surrounding trees that he doesn’t need to know ahead of and grass. Yet Fischer’s landscapes disrupt time exactly what that mark will produce. classical notions of the vista by using paint He has faith that, if handled properly, paint in a loosely signifying manner. White paint will communicate something of value. applied in a few jagged strokes evokes snow He believes. on a mountainside, the paint applied so thickly it at times appears as an attempted –Claudine Ise erasure. In one painting, the craggy face of a tree-studded mountainside appears to be sliding downward, as if the earth, trees Claudine Ise is a freelance arts writer and rocks were slipping off the mountain’s who for the past decade has worked surface like so much dripping paint. in the field of contemporary art as a writer and curator. She’s lived in In this way Fischer’s paintings can be seen Chicago, IL, since 2008. Before moving as working against themselves. But in using to Chicago, she was associate curator paint as a disruptive device to undercut the of exhibitions at the Wexner Center Sunday Best, 2009, oil on canvas, 10" x 12" work’s representational functions, Fischer for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, where risks making paintings that are merely she organized a number of solo and vessels for imaginative projection. In this incoherent or inert. Either the painting thematic group exhibitions. context, Weiser’s account of Bannack, MT, succeeds at capturing something distinctive reads as fiction, a rollicking ghost story that about its subject or the whole thing falls provides an interpretive framework from apart. Perversely, Fischer strives to make which Fischer’s spectral figures can emerge paintings that manifest both of these as more fully human. outcomes. And this is where things get tricky. Image on page 5: Because, of course, when you attempt to Original Location, 2009, oil on canvas, Functioning in a somewhat analogous reanimate the dead, you may inadvertently 22" x 26" fashion to the portraits are the landscapes wind up with something that’s less like from Fischer’s Original Location series. a friendly ghost and more like a mindless Ranging from picturesque mountains and zombie. So how can the artist enable these lakes to nondescript wooded areas seen ghosts, these mottled amalgams of paint, as if through the window of a passing car, to communicate on their own terms without these sites are as anonymous as the subjects putting words into their mouths? For Fischer of Fischer’s portraits. Yet they also seem the answer is to let paint do the work of strangely familiar.