Kim Fisher

Artist’s Statement

My work is a direct response to living and working in Los Angeles.

My paintings are interpretations of clippings from newspapers and magazine pages. Fragments become imbued with pathos while they forge relationships with painting, namely light, surface and color. The quality of the original scraps and the subsequent paintings reflect the effect sun and heat have over time on materials in Los Angeles.

More recently, I have begun using a camera to directly source my visual material, recording visual snippets and information surrounding my day to day experience living in Los Angeles to create large scale collages. (My practice has always utilized collage in the preliminary conception of my paintings as well as the approach I take when installing and arranging them for an exhibition.)

The collages assume the form of enlarged, oversized, ripped and cut paper but on closer inspection reveal that they are collaged screen prints on cut aluminum. The works escape the fragility of paper while still retaining the marks and character of their material origins. Like the scraps they are derived from, my paintings become embedded with complex surfaces and a strong material presence.

Social and cultural questions surrounding location, landscape, and personal experience are evoked through collage, scale, and/or an obscuration from the original source. (i.e. the inside of a bubblegum wrapper, the reverse side of a page, the margin of a book) Arranged in groups, fragments of frozen images and color form a psychological space. With this, I hope to evoke adverse feelings and tensions like desire, melancholy, beauty, anxiety and visual disorientation. The harsh effects of the climate are echoed in the faded colors and torn edges of the shapes, suggesting the ephemerality and transience of the landscape in Los Angeles.

Website: themoderninstitute.com/artists/kim-fisher

Biography

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2018
The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland

2017
If…We, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL

2016
A Little Bit of But, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA

2014
Dirty Kitchen, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland

Selected Group Exhibitions

2018
Brush for Hire, Curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston, ICA, Los Angeles

2017
The Brightsiders, Curated by Adam Miller, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA

2014
Made In LA, curated by Connie Butler and Michael Ned Holte, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

2013
Painting in Place, curated by Shamim Momin / LAND, Farmers and Merchants Bank, Los Angeles, CA

Select Fellowships and Awards

2018
COLA, City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship Award, Los Angeles

Selected Bibliography

2016
Taft, Catherine, “Not Expecting Any Disasters” (A Little Bit of But exhibition catalog), Published by LAXART, December 2016.

2014
Berardini, Andrew, Mousse Magazine, “Pieced Together: Alice Konitz and Kim Fisher”, No.45 October-

2009
Nickas, Robert, “Painting Abstraction”, Phaidon Press Limited, 2009.

Education

M.F.A., 1998
Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA

B.A., 1996
University of California, Los Angeles, CA