CARLY FISCHER

Life tends to come and go, that`s ok as long as you know

23.07.2011 – 20.08.2011



Think Thomas Demand´s paper environments meet Richard Wentworth´s photos of rubbish left around the city and you find yourself at Carly Fischer?s sculptures. Scrunched up Coke cans, Mars bar wrappers and cigarette packets that are a part of every urban environment are presented to us ? not as readymades but as carefully constructed, painstakingly put together, to-scale, to-colour hand made paper sculptures.

Trash is a part of urban life no matter which city you live in. But there is also little difference between the rubbish of Tokyo and the trash of Melbourne. Mars, Coke and Marlboro are brands that are not limited by geography or differences in the culture of various urban centres. And yet, in terms of visibility, unless there is so much of it that it is literally in the way, we usually do not see it. Here, however, Fischer gives us no choice. Trash is presented back to us on a pedestal. Is it about trash or is it about art? Today we have information thrown at us all the time. In order to keep on track we have to edit. From shutting out sales pitch yells to buy a scratch card during a Ryanair flight to filtering out spam, we have to constantly sift the trash from the treasure.

The fetishisation of the art object (trash on a pedestal) can also be understood as a comment on the art world. Whilst at first glace these sculptures could be ?real? (a Dunkin? Donuts packet on a pedestal) they are not about trying to mislead. For whilst they clearly reference the rubbish they represent, the hand-madeness of the objects is quickly apparent. Which begs the question, what the use is of the original object today when every object, every person, every idea has millions of replications online. Has the original object become, in fact, completely redundant? Why have an object when you can have an image? A replica? A copy?

Objects are, slowly but surely, all becoming relegated to two categories: trash (on the street; discarded), or treasure (in museums, archives, art collections). Fisher's installations at once add to and take away from the trash of the world, providing a poignant comment on globalization as well as the increasingly questionable role of the physical (art) object in today?s mobile, uber-connected (virtual) world.

Elly Clarke, artist & curator based in Berlin and Birmingham