Wandering Down 82nd Ave. with Simone Fischer: Part I — ANTITOURS
By LAUREL V. MCLAUGHLIN
We stood in the parking lot of a long-since-closed store with paint peeling so intensely that I couldn’t tell what it used to be right off 82nd Avenue in Portland, Oregon. Masked, socially-distanced, and bundled against the winter Oregon chill, artist Simone Fischer passionately relayed the fundamental elemental kinship at the heart of her sculpture process in metal and how it comes full circle—from the landscape, to the industry of the working classes that historically immigrated to the area, to her hands. Our walks led us to many seemingly ubiquitous places to my two-year Portland eyes, such as Home Depot and gentrified apartment buildings. But Simone knew better. Such wanderings precipitated her extant research, which branched into new and unforeseen paths, wending its way into her practice and my still lingering sense of newness in this place. ANTITOURS I, a research-based publication accompanying Simone Fischer’s solo exhibition, a sermon for crows, June 4–July 1, 2021, at after/time collective, gradually unfolded, amassing a host of archival, embodied, and sculptural research, only some of which could be published. But that’s the beauty of an anti-tour—it’s conspicuously unfinished and provisional much like our walks. In two interviews, Simone generously revisits our treks. In this first interview, we focus on ANTITOURS I, which etches new routes into her already sedimented topography of place.
Simone Fischer’s personal archives, Grandpa riding “T for Trouble” while G.I. Joe’s Army Surplus was built across the street, 1987. 35mm photography, 5 x 7 in. Photo: Susan Fischer (Simone’s Grandmother).
Laurel V. McLaughlin (LVM): Where are you from in Portland and how did a sense of place first emerge within your work?
Simone Fischer (SF): To put it plainly: I grew up in southeast Portland behind a shopping development on 82nd Avenue on the edge of “felony flats,” a neighborhood which historically housed the largest concentration of felons in the city and was known for crime, theft, drugs, and visible houselessness. I remember all the trailer parks and my old neighbors who used to live across the street until a MAX parking lot replaced fifteen houses. I’ve always felt this deep shame stemming from where I lived in Portland, because it was so different from what people expect when they visit; but I think it’s important to embrace those cold, hard facts. I know I’m not the only one whose family lives where they can afford to, even if it means staring at Home Depot’s asshole for the last thirty years.
Living on the east side of 82nd Avenue on the surface was always considered seedy or “sketchy” compared to central Portland for a multitude of reasons: lacking in green space, high police activity, dangerously narrow sidewalks, few crosswalks, and some of the highest pedestrian fatalities in the city. I argue what makes my neighborhood feel “dangerous” is that it doesn’t immediately welcome the stranger or curious tourist (if any). You have to know your way around from hard-earned experience. The businesses on the outskirts cater to their loyal regulars, not curious hipsters who think it’s “edgy” to shop at Fubonn’s. Despite the rough exterior, 82nd is low-key home to some of the most underrated restaurants run by staunch local business owners with fiercely loyal patrons, myself included. It’s not uncommon to find white spray-painted ghost bikes chained to stop signs in memoriam, the notorious 72 bus line, police shootings, cheap motels, and scorched parked campers. I highlight these details because I see my landscapes wielding “disorder” as resistance to outsider perception. On the edge of the city, Portland is unmasked and the strain of a global pandemic has only exacerbated what we already knew. I believe the city “divide” is 82nd, an entire world away from the crunchy Portland transplants who move here for neoliberal politics, beer, and coffee—narratives defined to attract tourism and commerce. But I grew up on the edge of the city with incarcerated family members dealing with generational addiction and poverty, racism, drugs, car theft, and depression—Portland’s dirty little secrets that people try to ignore. I might seem harsh, but I believe radical honesty and critique is one of the highest forms of love. I document my home as a form of ritual and protection in hope of addressing the needs of life on the outskirts of Portland. Over-policing the poor isn’t and hasn’t solved anything. At some point you have to air it out and acknowledge the realities of what I see everyday. I always felt there was so much visible strength and pain within my immediate community that told a much different story of Portland: more so along the lines of a fast-food riddled Bladerunner than a corny Portlandia episode. My fiancé is from north Portland and got robbed at gunpoint when he used to work at the Plaid Pantry off 60th Ave. It’s traumatic shit like that.
But my grandparents who have lived in the same house for over fifty years would tell me stories and show me pictures of them riding horses in grassy fields before I-205 was built, or when luxury housing developments began shaving the face of Mt. Scott. I couldn’t hold these stories within myself and I wanted to begin a project to contain ignored and literally paved-over histories. I think there is a strong connection between commercial “development” and violence that stems from colonial origins on the ancestral lands of the Clackamas people, which we see manifest today as “urban renewal.” When I started grad school in 2018, I began documenting my neighborhood specifically, 82nd avenue from Johnson Creek to Flavel with my 4x5 camera. At that point, gentrification was beginning to seep it’s way into deep southeast Portland, but somehow 82nd still resisted crystallization, although development loomed in the distance. Documentation itself was a way I found power and resistance by preserving old 82nd as I knew it through photography and journaling. Writing was so important because it was a way to release the energy of these stories contained within me. Rage is a huge motivator in my work and the pen was truly my first medium of expression. Artistically, photographers like Latoya Ruby Frazier and Jim Goldberg were massively influential on my work. The Notion of Family (2014) and Raised by Wolves (2007) changed me. I learned the camera was a way I could frame and build my own reality as I saw it around me and I haven’t stopped documenting since.
Simone Fischer, camper, 2020. Instant photography.
Simone Fischer, ANTITOURS I, 2020.
LVM: I was so grateful to spend time with you on several walks around 82nd Avenue, as I learned so much about this place from your powerful oral storytelling. Our research alludes to the multiplicity of these histories through its dual format of official histories alongside personal ones. So, could you describe some of the places that we wandered through and how these places became dualistic research threads that shaped both a sermon for crows, June 4–July 1, 2021, at after/time, and the accompanying publication, ANTITOURS I?
SF: When we began researching this exhibition in late 2020, I knew this it would be the perfect opportunity to debut ANTITOURS I—my very own fucked up version of “tour” that confronts Portland’s uncomfortable histories through a personal recollection of place via generational wisdom, my wayward archive, and historical documents. ANTITOURS I was an idea that blossomed naturally out of my research inspired by Norman Klein’s book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997) and Carla Rossi’s legendary “Vaseline Alley” tours (2019) in Portland. Much of my practice consists of telling stories and oral histories, and I wanted to distill these conversations/sensations into a visual and written work. I think it’s really important to give this work context and provide viewers with a deeper dive into why I focus on the specific landmarks of Johnson Creek, the New Copper Penny (NCP), and I-205.
I grew up on the urbanized Johnson Creek watershed, a waterway that has been ravaged with pollution since early colonial contact. Historically, Johnson Creek was a major Indigenous trading route, only second to the Columbia basin. Salmon once were plentiful until colonization and industrialization like fish farming nearly decimated their populations. Housing developments were built along the creek and flooded dozens of times. You see, much of southeast Portland rests on a floodplain. During the 1930s settlers attempted to reroute the creek by digging out bends in the river to decrease flooding based off of inaccurate scientific studies, which failed to prevent any flooding and practically destroyed the natural habitat in the process. In particular, the 1964 “Christmas Flood” deeply changed the landscape. Johnson Creek flooded neighborhoods in the Foster-Powell area and surreal photos of entire houses floating down the Willamette River surfaced in the newspaper. Mostly, immigrants and working class residents lived in these areas; so, the most vulnerable communities endured the brunt of floodings. In a way, I always saw the flash floods as the land's revenge on exploitative industrialization of Portland and the cruel irony of building residential housing on an active floodplain as colonial hubris.
Simone Fischer, The New Copper Penny, 2021. Steel etching, 44 x 60 in. Photo: Mario Gallucci.
My other points of focus are the New Copper Penny and I-205. If you’re from Portland, you already know what I’m talking about when I say the New Copper Penny—a notorious bar and event space off 92nd and Foster that hosted off-track bets, an Outkast dance party, weddings, bikini contests, and intense brutality, owned by the controversial, late local legend: Zaki Tzantarmas. Tzantarmas was a Greek immigrant who arrived in the States with five cents in his pocket—as the story goes—and who built his life in east Portland, resisting the gentrification of the Lents neighborhood for decades until 2016. When he arrived to the States he worked as a folk dancer until Tzantarmas saved up enough money in 1972 to buy the rundown bar Copper Penny that he subsequently changed to the New Copper Penny. Eventually, Tzantarmas bought the whole damn block in Lents, and actually lived in the neighborhood, becoming a staple in the east side Portland community. My grandparents and my mother specifically remember the NCP vividly. My mother would tell me about how the NCP was one of her favorite spots to frequent in her twenties during the nineties in Portland. She said NCP was always open after hours and after hitting the bars downtown they would come back to NCP and dance into the wee hours of the morning. She said eventually the NCP got “skanky” and the once hot spot became a last resort in the early 2000s according to her. I remember sitting in the back seat of my mother’s 1994 gold Honda Accord as she drove underneath that huge, red Lincoln neon sign off 92nd Ave. She would drive my little brother and I to and from his baseball practice at Lents Little League, until her Honda was stolen and used in a bank robbery—the vehicle was held up in the courts as evidence for months. I say you’re not officially from Portland until your car gets stolen.
Anyways, by the time I turned twenty-one in 2013, the New Copper Penny was past its prime, but continued to galvanize the Lents neighborhood. It was a concatenation of civil rights activism, shootings, bar fights, and constant news reports interviewing angry residents who wanted the NCP’s OLCC (Oregon Liquor Control Commission) license revoked. After a bitter battle with Prosper Portland, Tzantarmas finally sold the bar in 2016 to a developer who put a big ugly apartment over it. Just a year after he sold the bar, Zaki died in 2017. When the New Copper Penny sold, the face of the Lents neighborhood changed entirely. During one of our parking lot conversations, we walked from 82nd to 110th and Foster. I took you to where the New Copper Penny stood, but all you saw was another boring apartment building that will look like shit in thirty years. It feels like I’m trying to show you the ghosts in my head of a place that only exists in my mind—the born and raised psyche of Portland. Within our 12-block walk, you can see the highly gentrified Lents neighborhood come back into itself by the time you hit 95th and beyond.
My final piece of research is centered on I-205, the highway that exists behind my house. My grandparents bought their house in 1971 and by 1974, I-205 construction began. 82nd Avenue aka Highway 213 was the original highway in east Portland, but during the 1960s, the Happy Valley Commission wanted to artificially create Happy Valley as a Portland-area suburb; and, in 1985 Clackamas the Town Center was built. Similar to I-5, I-205 destroyed east Portland neighborhoods and agriculture harboring pollution and noise that cut through red-lined neighborhoods. Once I-205 was installed, again, our neighborhood changed completely. The exposure to pollution and fumes from the highway, the noise and garbage. The 82nd Drive in was replaced by 82nd Cinema Theater and a shopping development where G.I Joe (ironically) was built. My grandparents and a few neighbors tried to fight it but lost. My Grandpa always says the city board pushes everything through for permits without any resident input. Con Battin, the elementary school my mother and aunts attended, used to be across the street and was demolished in 1988 as the shopping development continued to devour my block. Home Base (present day Home Depot) was built and our block changed from a residential neighborhood into a storefront, again, without any residential input or consideration. Developers run this town; and, as I write these words, construction workers are literally breaking concrete next door to build an apartment complex. Non-stop dump trucks, dust, burning asphalt, drilling and beeping. The same earth rattling destruction we have endured for almost fifty years. I see the land my family has stewarded for generations as a precious relative that must be protected at all costs. Despite urbanization we see so many animals in our yard: bunnies, hummingbirds, possums, and the big fuzzy bumble bees. This land is a sanctuary with limited greenspace compared to the west or central eastside. Our parks over here are a joke and are poorly maintained. Eminent domain haunts me and my family, but I cherish this time we have together during a global pandemic and incalculable death and grief.
Simone Fischer, another one bites the dust, 2020. Medium format, 6 x 7 in, Scanned image by: Simone Fischer.
LVM: The walking is just one of the methods you use in your “embedded research,” in your approach to making from, with, and of a place, as you alluded to in that rich answer. Could you talk more about these methodologies and your research process?
SF: Walking, or maybe wandering, is so important and brings a discursive element to my research because it’s the way I am entirely present in my body, connecting me to the heartbeat of this place. Rather than force my work, I let it organically arise based on what’s happening within this landscape. I walk to get away from my studio, to get air, and to cry to watch the way light falls in a particular location if I plan to photograph it. Honestly, most of my best work arises from walks. I think physicality is a major part of my work because my body and its relationship to the land holds these histories. This place changes every day and ditching a car allows me to connect to my landscape intimately and vulnerably, responding to what I see around me first hand. Sometimes people let me make a portrait of them, sometimes I visit business owners and friends for updates on the latest drama in their lives or new customers they despise. Strangely, when I’m in the flats I feel the most at home and I’ve spent years building (and sometimes destroying) relationships in this landscape. My identity has been defined by this space and has taught me so much about resistance and biting back. Sometimes I catch myself dreaming about leaving it all for New York, but I will always be a regional artist from old, moldy Portland. No matter how much it stings.
LVM: How did you translate these anti-tours in design in collaboration with Justine Highsmith?
SF: Honestly, hats off to Justine for taking on this beast. I knew I wanted to focus on the fragments and there is only so much you can fit into a small publication. Justine was instrumental in design and organizing a massive amount of information. Similar to our conversations and walks, I pulled pieces from my private archive: photos taken by my family, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera, combined with the research we gathered from public archives, into a visual and written work. I was thinking about maps and creating something that is portable and could be carried. The visual itself is a collage of embedded research that complicates a traditional map by overwhelming the viewer with visuals. ANTITOURS I is not set up in a linear manner which allows the viewers' eyes to wander across the image and focus on what catches their attention. It’s like my psychological rendering of a place that I reflect back to viewers. I had to keep reminding myself that this is only the first volume, and I plan to publish more ANTITOURS I in the future.
LVM: Definitely true, and I’m very much looking forward to ANTITOURS II! You began your artistic practice in photography, and you mentioned how it’s a type of framing of the world that gave you a sense of agency and belonging. How do you employ photographic practices in the publication?
SF: This publication was a challenge because most of the images were pulled from public archives, old family photos, pieces of my cedar tree, newspapers, and journals because I was researching places that don't exist anymore, trying to unpack specific histories within the landscape. My photos are often confrontational in aura and I wanted to keep that same energy of overwhelming imagery throughout the collage. I tore up research and images to “fit” our decided print size. The act of tearing is tactile and sometimes violent. I think my frustration comes through in the handling of the materials, but also the delicate balance of weaving a story together. I find power in telling my story because I used to think it wasn’t worth telling. I tried to minimize myself to fit into cliché Portland tropes. It was the simple moves like keeping the colors red and black that reference things like the Blazers; but more deeply, these colors also have cultural meanings specific to the Pacific Northwest.
LVM: These photographic practices don’t strike me as “documentary”—in that they don’t just take an evidentiary impression of the world—there’s more there. Your photography has an intimacy with these places that’s very much connected to communities. How do you view the communities which you both reference and relate to in these photographs?
SF: When I began this project in 2018, I was much more focused on my outside community I grew up with because this was pre-COVID-19. I started bringing my friends into the studio and people I would meet on the street who would trust me to make their portraits or interview them. Looking back, these moments have become even more precious because once the pandemic hit, it got so scary; and, like everyone else, I had to physically withdrawal myself from the community as an act of love and safety. I still think I’m coming to terms with this, but I feel so blessed to have pre-pandemic photographs and intimate experiences. During the pandemic the Willamette Week published a story on how you have double the risk of contracting COVID-19 east of 82nd Avenue because neighborhoods are often comprised of the working-class, aka “essential workers,” who don’t have the choice to stay or work from home while infection soars. Instead of photographs, my support shifted into sewing masks for my community with the help of my brilliant Grandmother, who designed the masks based on her experience as a nurse for over 40 years. We sewed over five thousand masks for folks across Portland. Also, it wasn’t uncommon to find store shelves completely empty and it was terrifying to think a community who already experiences food insecurity would be further devastated by panicked over-shopping because nobody knew what was going to happen. I started a major garden in my backyard to donate produce to mutual aid groups.
But something else more internal happened too: I was forced to reckon with my own identity that I was avoiding. As a mixed woman of European, Mongolian, and Indigenous ancestry, not having access to your ancestors is one of the worst feelings in the world that still brings up major inadequacy within myself. I think my lost origins have in turn made me hyper-aware of my surrounding landscape to a point of borderline obsession. It’s always been my constant when I had no other answers. But I remind myself, so many others have similar stories. I’m speaking alongside anyone who has been removed from their families whether through diaspora, immigration, or death. In that way, my work is composed of delicate fragments that hold entire universes within them. This landscape and ecosystem is worth preserving and at the very least, I hope my photographic archive supports our resiliency by remembering where we came from and how we hold each other together.
LVM: That kind of leaning towards one another seems like the only way to get through right now. It’s radically relational. Your photographic processes are also entangled within other types of relations. I’m thinking about your object-based adjacencies that you cultivate through the methodology of “gleaning.” How do you see this practice?
SF: I think my obsession with (preferably) obsolete objects began with my Grandfather. He holds onto everything “just in case.” His attachment to “junk” and never wasting *anything* has always fascinated me and why I respect him. Some call it a hoarding complex, I call it one hell of a collection rendered through time. Inspired by my grandparents' thriftiness, I began to collect discarded objects from my walks in my neighborhood as metaphors or questions I was trying to answer or resolve within my work. When I glean, I’m not really thinking about art, I’m thinking about life and what I’m presently going through. I often see these discarded objects as metaphors of the bodies that are discarded from development and the capitalistic construction of “trash.” Basically, I have an unnatural attachment to broken things and the power to reassert value. After the hell of finishing my MFA program during the height of the 2020 pandemic and moving my studio back home, my gleaning drastically increased because I’m still looking for a job and I don’t have the funding for material to fabricate costly steel sculptures. Gleaned materials give me the control to reassert value back into objects and directly confront issues around identity, class, place, and control. The gallery or art space often heightens the impact of my found objects because they are typically crushed, melted, scorched, or shattered against a slick white-walled setting. These objects speak louder than anything I could create from scratch because of the environment they have endured; so, in that way, I see them as self portraits that represent my feelings of displacement, violence, and humor. I think being a smartass is important.
I wouldn’t be able to survive without a sardonic sense of humor as a way to push back against my own oppression. I am learning to accept the power in being undefinable or challenging what constitutes an “art object.” In fact, I defy photo documentation by rejecting the delusion of objectivity through unapologetically telling my own stories and owning my subjectivity. Artistically, I’m influenced by Michelle Lopez, Carol Bove, and Cady Nolan—powerhouse women who work with industrial materials.
Simone Fischer, OFFAL II, 2021. Shopping cart, flags, steel, plastic, 36 x 24 x18 in. Photo: Mario Gallucci.
Simone Fischer, OFFAL II (detail), 2021. Found Object, 36x24x18”. Photography by: Mario Gallucci.
LVM: And what is the affective residue of these found materials for you, and how do you require that of the viewer as well?
I was experimenting with found materials for my first solo exhibition 213 in February 2020, just a month shy before the world shut down from covid. I found a crushed shopping cart in a parking lot after picking up groceries after a long day of critique in grad school. I happened upon the mangled cart and was completely taken by the violent gesture. These shopping carts reflect my inner rage towards the commercial takeover that has completely changed the face of our neighborhood. The 82nd Drive Inn Theater and Con Battin Elementary School where my mother and aunts attended as children were all torn down and replaced with a shopping development in the late 1980s. While I was creating work for a sermon for crows, I was shadowing a demolition crew in southeast Portland I had met during one of my regular walks. I had been photographing an abandoned house for over two years since it sold, slowly watching the structure disintegrate into the landscape. The house was a squat for houseless folks seeking shelter and it caught on fire three times before it was eventually torn down. On the day of demolition, I pulled the torched shopping cart from a large heap of rubble. It was covered in soot and the plastic had melted from the high heat of the fires. In my world, the carts or OFFAL represent the “dead zones” that commercial developments create within communities which often correlate with a higher level of violence. My work elevates “low brow,” or mundane objects, within a gallery, highlighting conversations on exploitative commodification and class. The melted plastic speaks to my emotive renderings of material that point to confusion, loss, and allocation of power. Kroger (aka Fred Meyers) put so many mom-and-pop grocery stores out of business in Portland like Bazarr, a grocery store my Grandfather used to work at off southeast Division and 82nd Avenue where Portland Community College now stands. The burnt cart also speaks to an environment ravaged by historic forest fires, houselessness and trash can fires as a result of social unrest and police brutality we witnessed during 2020. My “new” cart OFFAL II was placed in the center of the room to confront viewers with emotional metaphors of hard truths rooted in my experience as a born-and-raised Portlander.
LVM: Your practice is so unapologetically autobiographical, but it circles around that center without necessarily naming it or explicitly representing it. In abstracting this process of self-knowledge and its rendering, you access the intersections, overlaps, the gaps, and erasures implicit within identity. You’ve mentioned that this is also motivated by lost origins. Could you describe how this has informed your work and also how it has shaped your view of hybridity and “authenticity”?
SF: When I talk about “lost origins,” it’s really coding bastard politics. I grew up being raised by a single mother of two, but my mother worked so much, I spent most of my time with my maternal grandparents, all of whom I love more than anything. Due to traumatic circumstances, I have no connection to my paternal family which feels like an invisible, gaping hole in my identity. As a woman of mixed European, Mongolian, and Indigenous ancestry, I’ve struggled with reclaiming my roots. It’s actually really depressing because at the end of the day, I don’t have answers to the most basic questions. I think this tension continues to galvanize my work and explains my drive to document and build my archive because it bears witness to complicated existence in America; hence my attachment to discarded objects when thinking about identity and power relations. I don’t know where I come from, so I’ve learned I look to the landscape for answers or just comfort. I think there is a lot of unnecessary shame that becomes projected on you as a bastard because you’re not fully accepted anywhere and you learn to internalize that shit fast. Despite strong relationships with my community, I often prefer to be alone because I feel like an outsider no matter what. Even in my own city. Even in my own family. Despite battling unhealthy levels of imposter syndrome, I am finding power in hybridity and being an undefinable, shapeshifter. Ai Wei Wei once said “If you know who you are, you’re not a real artist,” and I took that advice to heart. Ironically, I am learning to accept and derive power from a mixed-bastard status to subvert patriarchal standards that work to disempower me and by seeking complete autonomy of my own story and experiences despite my limitations. In a culture obsessed with categorical/compartmentalized identity, what does it mean to wield power through hybridity? I think it means being aware of your privileges and still having the courage to tell your story without fear of people actively trying to dehumanize or disempower you. To be fully and unapologetically human, and sometimes that means you don’t have all the answers and that's okay.
LVM: One of the aspects of the work in both ANTITOURS I and a sermon for crows that feels especially urgent to me is how you excavate the influence of class within this small part of the Pacific Northwest; and yet, it shows a microcosm of a larger whole. It indelibly impresses itself upon your autobiography and I’m curious to hear more how it shapes your relationship to photography, communities, and materiality?
SF: Photography was one of my first visual media but eventually my photo documentation alone wasn’t enough for me. At that point, I was shooting street landscapes and beginning to experiment with materials like steel. My Grandfather was a machinist and could fix anything, and his knowledge of steel inevitably began to influence my work. Somehow, I wanted to combine my photography practice and bring sculpture into play because it takes up space and adds meaning through its raw materiality. I began printing my photos onto steel and was graciously mentored by Garrett Price, another born-’n-raised Portlander who believed in my work enough to teach my technical practice. Once I printed my first steel images and etched them I was absolutely taken. Through the materiality of rust and steel I was able to bring in my own subjective feelings about what I have experienced within these landscapes to set my work ablaze. I primarily work with steel sculpturally because I connect the poetics of blood, iron, bodies, and exploitation. I view steel as a precious elemental relative and story-telling material. I grew up watching my Grandfather tinkering in his metal shop. It’s a way we bond together. I feel so lucky to have grown up in an intergenerational household and learn everything he can teach me about his extensive tool collection. I think sometimes he feels obsolete because of the dominance of technology and computers. And sometimes I feel that way too. He is my greatest mentor. He teaches me how to fix things by hand as a way for us both to feel useful and derive power without having to constantly buy new shit. The first time I picked up a welding torch it felt like pure power, a similar feeling I have when I use a camera. I moved from etching landscapes, to etching things like a scanned versions of my Oregon trail EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card blown up into a four-by-five foot image on steel. Again those feelings of shame and food insecurity crept back in, but I wanted to show how monumental food stamps were in my life and many others within my community during a time of mass unemployment and death. I was in the middle of my thesis semester in grad school when the pandemic shut down began. I was living off student loans and trying to save up enough money to afford material for my MFA thesis exhibition. I graduated without a commencement or job and immediately applied for food stamps to help reduce any cost burdens I could as I tried to get back on my feet. It’s taboo to “admit” you’re on food stamps because internalized capitalism has told us that somehow this is our fault and/or we are too “lazy” to work for a better life. Not only does this point to class divides, but also to the erasure of Indigenous identity based on the bloody “Oregon Trail” origin story.
Oregon EBT cards picture a snowy mountain presumably Wyeast (Mt. Hood) and a covered wagon. It’s in these subtle ways or reminders white supremacy seeps into everyday life down to benefits. I remember playing the Oregon Trail game on those dinosaur computers when I was in elementary school, you know, the one where you constantly die of dysentery but provided no significant history on any Indigenous culture pre-contact during early education. My work holds multiple meanings and histories depending on who is looking and I do not shy away from uncomfortable conversations if I haven’t already made that painfully clear. I say it uses photography as a way of visually documenting time and sharing my experience projected back onto industrial material because it’s a language of my own emotional reckoning using what’s closest to me.
LVM: And finally, how does this process of interviewing relate to your artistic practice?
SF: Calling it an “interview” is almost too formal, but that’s not to understate the time I spend with others I take very seriously. I love learning about people’s personal relationships with landscapes and making space to tell their stories. For me, it starts with my family and trying to learn more about my origins through them. I go on about my Grandfather and our time in the shop together, but the one person in life who probably understands me the most is my Grandmother. She also deals with lost origins and the resulting wounds that never fully heal. At the end of the day, we find comfort in each other because we understand, or just bitterly accept, what will always be unknowable. Our connection is deeply complex and slightly tense at times. I ask my elders about the landscape and all the stories they contain and what to share with me and others. These conversations are contagious and everyone always has something to contribute.
When I started grad school, I finally had a studio and began interviewing friends, business owners and people I would meet on the streets back into my art space to make pictures, videos or just hang out and talk about whatever we wanted. I don’t exist in a vacuum and I want my archive to reflect who’s around me. I view these conversations as precious pieces of discursive research that absolutely influence my work both directly and indirectly.
This interview was made possible in part because of the support from our Patreon members.
Simone Fischer, SNAP (detail), 2021. Steel etching, 44 x 60 in. Photography credit: Mario Gallucci.
Simone Fischer (b.1991, Portland, OR) is a multidisciplinary visual artist who specializes in photography, historical archives, installation, sculpture, writing and performance. Simone holds a B.A. in Gender Studies & Philosophy at Portland State University (2013), and an M.F.A in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in 2020. Her work has been shown in multiple venues in Portland, including the Lodge Gallery (2018), 511 Gallery at PNCA (2020), and her solo show 213 at the Glass Gallery at PNCA (2020). She has exhibited internationally at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany (2020) and attended artist residencies at Caldera Arts in Sisters, OR (2019). She was the 2021 artist-in-residence at after/time in preparation for her solo exhibition, a sermon for crows, June 4–July 1, 2021.
Laurel V. McLaughlin is a writer, curator, and art historian from Philadelphia based in Portland, OR (on the unceded lands of the Bands of Chinook, Clackamas, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Tualatin Kalapuya, and Wasco peoples). McLaughlin holds MAs from The Courtauld Institute of Art and Bryn Mawr College, and is currently a 2020–2021 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art and History of Art Ph.D. Candidate at Bryn Mawr, writing a dissertation concerning performative migratory aesthetics. Her criticism, interviews, and essays have been published in Art Papers, Art Practical, Performa Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, among others. She has organized exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, FJORD Gallery, the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with the Arthur Ross Gallery and the ICA Philadelphia, AUTOMAT Gallery, Vox Populi, the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, and Paragon Arts Gallery. She is curating a survey, Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body, at Lafayette College, September 2–November 13, 2021, and co-editing a volume on the work of Tania El Khour