Lynn L. Fischer:
Back in high school when my lab partner and I dissected a cat in advanced biology, I was astonished to come upon a kidney. It was a gorgeous blue, crisscrossed by red and yellow veins. How strange, I thought, that something so beautiful lay hidden so far under the skin. And yet, like everything else inside the cat’s body (including her unborn kittens), it was also vaguely repulsive.
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But the sculptures’ valves and tubes and general resemblance to viscera suggest they may be fragments torn from larger wholes. No two of the small sculptures in the series titled “Private Parts”–shown in one group of 4 and another of 18–are alike. And while some strongly resemble organs, others resemble exterior body parts: one piece in the group of 18 consists of two round, pinkish breastlike shapes sporting black growths that could be nipples or tiny penises. Some pieces appear to be caught up in mysterious natural processes. Blobs of a yellowish substance emerge from the valves of a black, vaguely heart-shaped “creature”: Some sort of sap? Evidence of growth or decay? Sometimes playful, even silly, Fischer’s “Private Parts” allude to the body’s fragility and temporality.
Like the others, these four “Private Parts” don’t venture far from the wall; as sculptures go, they’re somewhat two-dimensional. Fischer’s three larger works, each about four feet high and suspended a foot or so from the wall on metal hooks, are more sculptural as well as more aggressive. The upper half of the one titled Processor #2 is a long curved “spine” sprouting pairs of “limbs” that look like overgrown vertebrae or truncated ribs; its lower half consists of a large sac ending in a small tube. Processor #4 has a similar sort of spine with a more pronounced, painful-looking twist. Like Processor #2 it ends in a large, distended sac, one side of which sports a small, folded-over tubular growth tucked against the sac like some kind of vestigial organ. Parts of the piece have a rough, crackled surface; here and there the reddish orange clay even seems about to flake off.
