Wandering Down 82nd Ave. with Simone Fischer: Part II — a sermon for crows
By LAUREL V. MCLAUGHLIN
I walked into the space of after/time expecting to see the works that I had seen lying horizontal in acid baths in Simone Fischer’s. In their verticality on the wall, they confronted me with their sheer scale, no longer allowing me to look down on them. Striations in rust, etched car-dealer for-sale flags, and even dessicated flies trapped in acid tracks, unabashedly received my gaze and spoke back. The shopping cart seemed to have a visual language all its own, and the flashing sign menacingly told me its opinions. As a recent transplant to Portland in 2018 from Philadelphia, the thought of researching alongside Simone for ANTITOURS I seemed daunting until I experienced Simone’s radical honesty and warmth—a rare combination. Seeing these works in person, all of the intimidating feelings returned in a critical way. This place, far from the fabled Portlandia, keep-shit-weird, crunchy utopia has deep histories worth facing, continually.
Documentation Simone Fischer, left: SNAP middle: OFFAL II, Right: COUNTY LINE, 2021. Steel etchings, 44x60”, sculpture. Photography credit: Mario Gallucci.
Laurel V. McLaughlin (LVM): While Part I of our interview focused on the publication ANTITOURS I and larger methodologies that you employ in your artistic practice, in Part II, I hope we can delve into the works that you’re exhibiting in a sermon for crows, on view June 4–July 1, 2021 at after/time, curated by Todd Molinari, and supported by the new collective including Todd, Shannon Edwards, Francis Gallagher, Kelly Marshall, and Wade Schuster. You’ve been steadfastly imagining this new body of work and I’m curious how you’re seeing it in dialogue with ANTITOURS I? Could you also talk about your choice of title?
Simone Fischer (SF): Each piece in the show responds to my artistic research atmospherically and emotionally through the material. The title, a sermon for crows, has multiple meanings. It was partially inspired by my last mass communal memory: ironically attending midnight mass with my Catholic Grandmother on Christmas Eve at the Grotto (off Sandy and 82nd in Northeast Portland) in 2019, three months before the COVID-19 pandemic took control. I don’t consider myself a Christian, but being with my Grandmother and watching her sing and pray that night in a packed church stays with me. In my own way, documentation and archiving my landscape has become my ritual of comfort, for the same reasons my Grandmother goes to church: it’s something we have always known. This work is a way to connect to the land I have known my entire life. The crows are a notorious constant in Portland and represent a territorial protection of space and knowledge in my work. I see my work as the embodiment of a crow: what it is to be labeled as a pest or stranger in your own environment, an omen of death or the bringer of light, I believe this landscape carries the same energies and complexities of the crow. This body of work was created during one of the most intense moments in history, and my archive continues to bear witness through everything we would rather forget. ANTITOURS I provides a deeper dive into this landscape through a print publication. I was able to distill my research through the subversion of a “map” alongside the visual work for a sermon for crows. Because my practice is heavily research-based, a publication allowed me to go deeper and provide viewers with the antithesis of a tour you would expect of Portland in exchange for the brutal realities of life on the edge of Portland.
Simone Fischer, SUMMATION, 2021. Steel etching, 44x60”. Photography credit: Mario Gallucci.
Simone Fischer, COUNTY LINE, 2021. Steel etching, 44x60”. Photography credit: Mario Gallucci.
LVM: You’ve made numerous new works, ranging from etchings to sculptures, all of which cohere through the expansion of photographic processes. Could you walk readers through the various expanded photographic processes that you employ?
SF: I used to think my practice began with a photograph, but it actually begins with a walk to escape overwhelming anxiety from quarantine and loss, coupled with an endless nagging urge to document a landscape changing every day at the speed of light. Sometimes I happen upon a picture, sometimes I’m coming back to document something again, or see it in a different light. I often journal or follow up with people I meet when I get back home as ritual documentation and creation of my personal archive of Portland. My photography is a visual extension of my private diaries, almost confessional in a way. My Grandmother was an avid photographer who pictured her own motherhood and family and still continues to do so. She would artfully arrange her images based on dates and events complete with witty captions and time stamps giving voice to all of her photographs. My grandmother was proto-Instagram, analog social media if you will, via family photo albums. Her photo captions now ring true to scrolling Instagram where witty language can elevate the visual. She does the same thing for her family photo albums in hand-written cursive. I think somehow that stuck with me as well, and my original interest in photography stems from my Grandmother’s excellent documentation and desire to tell her story. We both experience lost paternal origins and I think we document our lives for personal reasons of reclamation to create the world that you belong to because of always feeling incomplete.
When I got to grad school I was focused on photography, photo books, and story-telling. But after printing photo after photo, it didn’t feel like it was enough. I wanted to explore how material and metaphor carry meaning in tandem with my photography practice. I began to see steel as an elemental relative, connecting humanity and metal. Iron is found in our blood and iron ore is the foundation for steel. My Grandfather was a machinist for over forty years and I work with traditional trade or “blue-collar” technical skills in my art as homage to my elders. I wanted to combine my photography practice with my sculptural practice and began printing my photographs on industrial steel sheets etched in acid. I was generously mentored by born-and-raised Portland artist Garrett Price who believed in my work back in 2019 and taught me the technical etching processes. Once I made my first series of steel etchings, I finally felt like myself—I finally felt like I found my voice as a visual artist. The rust and oxidation give my images a highly emotive rendering of a landscape that highlights my rage, sadness, love, and caring too much. I subvert the traditions of documentary through the fire of etched steel, a rendering that feels fitting for an emotional woman and city built off the exploitation of resources, such as steel and lumber. I learned how to screen print and I love the transfer from a photo negative to screen, the image becomes something else entirely. I love the immediacy of screen printing and its malleability. I’m not in this to create a perfectly registered image, I’m an emotional screen-printer. Sometimes I make my ink too thick or too viscous depending on how I want to transfer the emotions I’m feeling into a print. Screen printing allows my hands or “humanness” to get back into the making process which ends up as a one-of-a-kind print every time. The larger room for error, the better.
LVM: In part one of this conversation you described how you learned many of these processes from your Grandfather, and you just spoke about how working with foundational materials is forging a type of elemental kinship. So, do see these works as collaborative in some sense, and if so, how?
SF: My Grandpa Jack is like a father to me and tinkering with him in the shop is priceless. I was always a bit of a tomboy growing up and I loved watching my Grandfather build and fix things with all of his old tools. I loved the smell of the garage and the sickly sweet smell of lingering gasoline. Learning to work with metal under his expertise bonds us in a special way that I like to express through steel in my work. I’m a conceptual artist; so an idea for a sculpture piece first exists in my mind's eye, and my Grandfather helps me realize my weird, ambitious visions. His knowledge, experience, and extensive tool collection bring my ideas to life and helps to provide the limitations of material and what is possible for us to do alone. I absolutely see them as collaborations, but not in a forced, awkward academic way, more like intimate lessons passed down from generation to generation. All the little things we carry and mean so much more to us as time passes. My Grandfather’s job as a machinist has been replaced by CNC routers and computers. He gets frustrated with computers because he can’t fix it with his own hands; he doesn’t like surrendering his control to technology. I learn his knowledge of how to sculpt with steel and channel it into my art because now his knowledge becomes physical. Obsolete processes are important to me. His skills are the foundation of my practice as an artist and our collaboration is intergenerational wisdom and love. I derive power from knowing how to move in traditionally male-dominated spaces as a woman, this includes MIG welding, chop saws, or plasma cutters, the more industrial and dangerous the better in my book. I think my Grandpa is a badass and I hope one day to try and understand a quarter of his knowledge and uncanny ability to fix everything himself.
Simone Fischer, Grandpa Jack in his garage working on my new sculpture, 2021. Cell phone photo. Photography credit: Simone Fischer.
Simone Fischer, Pouring an acid bath, 2021. Cell phone photo. Photography credit: Noah Bentley.
LVM: It’s a lineage of conceptualization and immense skill, a multi-generational relationship with material that seems so important right now as resources are so often divorced from their origins and even the workers that know them best.
Turning to the works in the show, perhaps the largest are your etched steel works, massive in scale, and, as you just described, intensely laborious. How are you viewing these works in relation to the politics of your body?
SF: The body of work created for a sermon for crows are all highly referential to the proportions of my own body, or perhaps a vertical tombstone. My four-by-five foot steel etchings are absolute horrors to create. They really make you work for it. Every time I make one, it requires help from others because I physically cannot create these pieces alone. I rope my fiancé, my brother, the dogs, or my friends in—basically whoever is around me to help me pull screens or just move a piece into an acid bath. I am a workaholic and my internalized capitalism leaks into my work through invested processes and plain, old hard work. I’m trying to shake the urge to be constantly “busy” and make more time for rest. But being an artist still scares me because of the uncertainty in a recovering world reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, with a working-class background and family who didn’t really understand art as a career was possible. I have no backup plan, so I just work through the anxiety. I create work that isn’t “easy” to make, this isn’t a value judgment, but more so a way I encode my artistic meaning through specific, labor-intensive processes that highlight or connect the explorations of bodies, women, and material through extractive theories like capitalism. What are the physical contours of industry and commodification? I think there is a big-dick energy and humor about my work that turns the steel industry inside out through exposure and rust to highlight a frailty of these systems. My steel etchings relate to the body and reference industrial-scale simultaneously as an aggressive, confrontation of emotion rendered through steel and acid. They are abrasively laborious, dangerous to create, and heavy with the gravity of the world. To me, my etchings are the perfect material representation of the psychogeography of my wayward archive.
LVM: Drawing upon your practice of gleaning found objects, you also included this melted shopping cart from the grocery store Fred Meyer with a kind of improvised flagpole of sorts. How are you viewing this work within a larger lineage of the found objects, and how do you see it as radically different?
SF: My favorite children are my found object sculptures I glean from my landscape. They say everything that needs to be said. I am creating an oeuvre of misfit shopping carts from Fred Meyers (or Kroger) stores. My first cart OFFAL was a crushed shopping cart I found with a major attitude problem, and was featured in my 213 solo exhibition in February 2020. The crushed cart that still stood was the rejection of function as a capitalist object. It can’t really hold anything and it only moves in a counterclockwise circle and falls over constantly. It was a protest piece I gleaned from my neighborhood as a comment on the commercial rezoning that took place in the late 1980s that gutted and physically removed residential homes, tore down Battin Elementary my mother attended and the 82nd Cinema where my mother used to work. The crushed cart represents the violence of commercialism and the harming of our humanity. To refuse function is to jam up the cogs of the well-funded war machine. Let me be clear: I use found objects because I don’t always have the funds to buy expensive raw materials. Before I got the grant for this show, I was working with found objects because that's what was around me. I am a scrappy individual and these objects often say more about the landscape than I ever could. Houselessness in Portland has always been apparent to those who live on 82nd or beyond; but the 2020 protests brought these issues downtown, front and center rather than eschewing the houseless to the edges of the city. For a sermon for crows, I pulled the burnt shopping cart from the rubble of a now-demolished house I was documenting for over three years, until its demise in April 2021. The melted, drooping plastic handles and would-be warning sign, were so emotional for me. There was also a pair of safety glasses (which survived the three house fires at the same address) that were melted, almost as if they were dripping off the cart. The charred shopping cart was also a psychological reference of the historic 2020 fire season we experienced, my neighborhood was under level-one evacuation, and the fires and protests demanding racial justice under 45’s horrid handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Living in Oregon my entire life, I have never experienced the fires we had back in 2020 and I mourn for destroyed habitats, those who lost their lives, and homes that couldn’t even save us from the toxicity of the air. The frustrations of fighting with my Grandfather to wear a respirator when he went outside to water the garden with air so thick from smoke you’d get sick in minutes standing in it—this cart experienced all of that. Not even the fire was strong enough to cleanse us, or even begin to acknowledge the racial and class inequalities in the United States or just Portland alone. These objects hold permanent, indelible stories of the landscape I continue to document. My found objects interrupt typical, expected programming without a drop of mercy or reprieve. I see the art space as a place of confrontation through materials from my landscape. My memories and stories from the edge of Portland. They exist as archival spatial forms of documentation.
Simone Fischer, Steel Immemorial (dead flowers) detail, 2021. Steel light sculpture, 48x48x4”. Photography credit: Mario Gallucci.
LVM: There is a way in which this work reveals the vulnerability that you just relayed, and yet it also doesn’t fully reveal itself. I’m thinking of the strange melting of the cart’s plastic—its origins aren’t fully disclosed until you tell us. They’re not self-evident. How is this partial disclosure and obfuscation important to the autobiographical and socio-cultural politics of your work?
SF: I express my vulnerability best through the extreme treatment/manipulation of material. I think artists are constantly pressured to “explain” or identify, but in my story, it’s not that simple. My work leans into the complexity of identity in the United States with a focus on materials pushed (or melted) to their limits until they become something else. Personally, I struggle with my identity and reclamation of my Spanish, Indigenous, and Mongolian roots, so I transfer that emptiness and rage into the destruction of industrial material as a way of visually alluding to emotive ambiguity I experience and never being able to feel whole. I don’t have to disclose the specifics of my traumas in order to make you feel something. I let the torched cart and melted plastic do the talking by removing comforts people often take for granted. Immediacy is a potent tool. It circles back to my rendering of photography on steel, the rust is a visceral living thing with its own voice. As a woman, I feel constantly underestimated and often patronized in male-dominated spaces like the art world and blue-collar work. I feel like rust, iron, and menstruation, or maybe just industrial references of blood, are a part of my identity as a woman working in trade: I’m treated like an anomaly. The exploitation of the working class or “essential workers” has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: the rich get richer, but the poor get wiser. If you are working-class you probably didn’t have the luxury of being able to stay at home and wait out the pandemic. Women have undergone a massive exodus of the workforce because of the lack of childcare or support from the government. Just like wars, or any other dirty work, women and working-class people are treated like pawns and exploited in order to maintain the status quo. That’s why I printed my EBT Oregon Trail card on steel. It showed you can have a Master’s degree and still experience food insecurity. I graduated with my MFA in June 2020 into an unstable workforce, in a town that shut down three major art education institutions. I was not eligible for unemployment because I was a student and I hadn’t worked during my thesis semester. It was sheer hell but my EBT food card made sure I could eat without stressing about another bill I can’t pay. My work is confessional and bears witness in this way.
LVM: Thank you for sharing that, Simone.
You have a massive output in terms of artistic production. You’ve described taking thousands of photographs as a way of thinking through the work, and this carries over into other media as well, as you have found objects all over your backyard. How did you approach selecting work for this show with curator Todd Molinari?
SF: I see my vast output of work as the result of art being an everyday practice in my life. I collect objects, create sculptures, and photograph my landscapes as I move through my days. I’ve been seriously documenting my neighborhood since September 2018, so three years later into this project, there is a lot to sift through. I often work maximally as a visual mirror of a busy, stream-of-consciousness storytelling. I’m terrible at editing my own work and I knew for this show, I wanted to focus on the psychogeography of my landscapes I render through steel, but I also wanted to push my practice by expanding my own definition of a “landscape.” Printing my EBT card or turning my banal photo negatives into oxidized abstractions was a big turning point for me. I wanted to tap into what it feels like to occupy this space generationally, but become abstract due to the fall out of lost origins. How do you tell a story when you have access to so little? Todd Molinari was such a rock through this entire process and really pushed me to experiment and take risks for this show. Our weekly studio visits and the gallery residency helped me sharpen ideas and narrow down to what I really wanted to say. Todd made space for these conversations to unfold during my exhibition. So many people just pass through Portland, building their careers greedily, extracting what they need to get ahead with no intention of giving back. My show is concerned with an intergenerational reckoning of place and all of the things they don’t tell you about Portland. As an emerging artist fighting to find institutional support, this show centers the born-and-raised experience of 82nd Avenue that only local veterans can understand. Todd was instrumental in helping me create my own visual codes for a sermon for crows by exposing loss, resilience, melancholy and power through steel. I had all these plans for the show but the space dictated the flow of the work.
We placed the torched cart in the center of the room as a reference to the body, exploitation, and discard. The cart held a string of limp, torn flags I found near a used car lot, melted sunglasses and an instax photo of my bleeding gums. In a way, I see this piece as a fragment of the landscape and self portrait. OFFAL II confronts the violence of existing between a shopping development and a freeway to center decades of commercial exploitation. My light sculpture Steel Immemorial (dead flowers) was created with the love and guidance of my Grandfather after the passing of one of my good friends in May 2021. It was tragic and sudden and I think spending time with my Grandfather learning how to build a stand-alone, lighted floor sculpture was what I needed to channel the pain into something beautiful and productive and not give into my own destructive tendencies. It references blank marquee signage, infinity, and tombstones. The blank steel circles the feelings of never having a chance at closure and the bottomless rumination that follows. This was the last piece I made for the show to immortalize my friend David Ward, and honor all those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic. The chase light pattern and repetition conjures both hope, despair, and how mundane gestures can be the most painful of all. I was listening to a lot of Townes Van Zandt at the time and specifically his song “dead flowers,” sonically infused this sculpture with that same melancholy and beauty. After a studio visit with Legacy Russell in early 2020 (pre-covid), they challenged me to fuse my steel etching with my sculptures in order to have a stronger conversation on defining a place in Portland. I took that wisdom with me and when we were installing the show, it felt right to have my steel etchings surround my new sculptures to provide a complex presentation of the work. Todd knew how much work I created during this time, but was a sharp editor who helped me contour the show.
LVM: We’ve talked about how different the working conditions were for this exhibition with health concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic, your shift to mutual aid, and the ongoing gentrification within your neighborhood. For many cultural workers, processing this right now isn’t possible because they are still working. But you expressed the want, even the need, to discuss it. Could you share some of your reflections?
SF: I’m hesitant to fully define this moment because I believe we are still really going through it; but I’ve learned so much about what it means to keep creating during crisis. Before the pandemic, my practice was highly collaborative. I was making pictures with people in my studio and on the streets, and when the lockdown happened the isolation was so abrupt and extreme, I think we are collectively devastated by COVID-19. I find solace in knowing massive ideas will come of these times. Because I am so close with my Grandparents, I had to strictly isolate myself from my friends to keep them safe until we were vaccinated. We started gardening on their acre and providing fresh produce to family and friends during the summer of 2020 when unemployment was high and food scarcity was real. I consider my garden a long-term art piece that actually engages my community practically and spiritually. Akin to artists like Agnes Denes’ wheat field, Monet’s gardens, Sol Le Witt flowers in lines, or Frida Kahlo’s plants, all had gardens. My garden is a way to connect to the land my family has stewarded for over 50 years and resist the development. Gardening is now a part of my personal and social practice. Honestly, I think my food garden is one of the most punk rock ideas I’ve ever had. Nothing beats gifting your friends, family, strangers, or anyone in need with fresh produce. Nothing beats growing beautiful food to feed the ones you love. COVID-19 forced me to expand my practice and now I see gardening itself as visual expression and tenderness. It forced my social practice to shift and actually help people through practice means, not always creating art as the only response to social issues.
LVM: From our 5-hour long conversation during one of the first balmy evenings of a Portland May, I know that you’re always thinking about what’s next—not because you view artistic production in a capitalist way of needing the next project, but because this is a way of bringing the experiences of you and your community to other folks and places. So, what are you working on?
SF: I’ve been following a demolition crew in Portland who was kind enough to let me photograph demo’s of old Portland houses in my neighborhood. On top of documentation, I’ve also been collecting objects from these sites for my next exhibition. Compared to my last two solo exhibitions, my next is hyper-focused on demolition and all of the pieces left behind as metaphors of “Old Portland,” or potential hints at our own future destruction within this system. I’ve had a fascination with doors and it started in 2018, when I fabricated a brushed, steel door replica from my house during grad school. A couple months before a sermon of crows opened, I was collecting doors from a house demolition right off southeast 82nd Avenue and Luther. The doors are charred to various degrees after suffering three house fires. I focus on the symbolism of doors as visual representations of transformation or psychic shifts. I am fascinated with the mundane and I personally love confronting those rudimentary details of life in my work. These doors are the remnants of working-class neighborhoods that are hastily replaced by shopping developments and/or cheaply built apartments. I see my doors as the way back in, a contemporary ruin created during the twentieth century that barely survived until 2021. But, they also point to my lack of ability to articulate my story and what it feels like to be abruptly disconnected from your origins. I think the dismemberment of my doors from their original homes and hinges speaks to my half-breed, bastard status through discarded material. I am inspired by artists like Diamond Stingily and her work Entryways (1-5) (2019) and the painting That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) (1931) by Ivan Albright. Both artists are and were powerhouses and point to hyper-specific aspects of identity, strength, loss, attitude, and reference of self. Although I love my steel etchings, my next body of work confronts the reality of Portland through outcast materials found within the landscape.
I’m also dreaming up the next volume of ANTITOURS that I will eventually publish. After almost two years of unemployment, I finally got a job working for an art department for a film being shot in Portland. Going from not working at all for an extended period, to sixty-hour weeks was an intense shift and honestly, I don’t recommend it to anyone. But, it has me thinking about the old 82nd Avenue Cinema theater my mother used to work at. Before the cinema, it was 82nd Drive Inn until the eighties. I let my life bleed into my art because there is no such thing as separation. Film is now another influence and I want to create work that nods to the movie theatre I grew up with. I think it’s important to understand how culture is removed, erased, and reset during periods of ambivalent “renewal” in the United States. My art is a mirror of my surroundings but ANTITOURS presents an alternative history and future framed by an intergenerational experience within a landscape. I want to garden more with my family and feed my friends. I’m also trying to find more rest and figure out how to balance life, practice, and my next projects. I’m trying to remain open, but guarding my energy as much as possible. Honestly above anything else, I can really use a nap.
This interview was made possible in part because of the support from our Patreon members.
Simone Fischer, exhibition documentation, 2021. Steel etching, 44x60”, sculpture. 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 Khoury.
