Vernon Fisher remembers Easter-egg hunts. “When I was a kid, I was never any good at finding eggs. All the other kids would run around finding Easter eggs right and left till their baskets practically ran over, while I never found one unless I tripped over it or something. It never occurred to me that the eggs weren’t just scattered at random. It wasn’t until later I learned that they were always hidden next to objects, like fence posts or water hydrants.”
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White Hunter is a sculpture of a human skeleton with 14 copper stencils attached, each of a single word–“hunter,” “Nile,” “water,” “elephant.” From the title, the careful viewer will easily decipher the work’s “code”–that each of the words also makes sense when preceded by the word “white.” But not every aspect of the piece is so carefully planned: the stencils were attached to the skeleton not to give significance to specific bones or body parts but simply “where they would fit.”
One day Fisher “was watching a television magician and he was a great actor. He would start to do a trick and the trick would break down in the middle, and we would see the artifice and it was really funny.” The magician played these intentional breakdowns for laughs, “and while we were dying laughing at all his fake tricks he’d pull something out of a hat and it’s a real trick. So it’s like playing with the idea of being a magician/not a magician. And I was thinking of how similar that was to the way I work. It’s almost like I give you real money and I tell you it’s counterfeit–just the opposite of what you’d expect.”
