William Fisk: Oil on Canvas

"William Fisk is an accidental collector. His assemblage of cameras, projectors, splicers, staplers, pencil sharpeners and the like were acquired as potential models for his paintings, because of their modernist design qualities, the robust materials, and the quality of their manufacturing. Fisk has found in them the shapes, lines, textures, and colours that inspire and inform his paintings, that seem like perfect representations of these objects but are, in fact, subtly abstracted in his paintings through the overall flattening effect of the painting, and the modulation of colours. Fisk's accidental collection reveals an obsession with the formal properties of the objects in question and how to walk the line between abstraction and representation. The collection reveals Fisk's absolute delight in mechanical objects. Some are on their way to obsolescence, like moving image film cameras and projectors, 35mm SLR cameras, and analog audio equipment, though they have been taken up by their digital offspring and persist in their original manifestations for niche users. The Polaroid camera, represented in abundance in Fisk's collection and obsessive imagination, has reinvented itself in an analog format largely aimed at a youthful market that would hardly have remembered the company's heyday. On the other hand, many of Fisk's paintings represent seemingly timeless design objects: eyeglasses, a hole punch, desk lamps, chairs, staplers, microscopes, shoes, and the classic pencil sharpener. Each of Fisk's paintings slows down the culture of fast design, production, obsolescence, and disposal. Fisk pulls the objects out of their context in order to create artworks that are beautiful, and in that sense "useful", unto themselves. In the process of doing this, however, he also provokes an appreciation of the utility of these everyday design and engineering marvels." Jim Shedden. Manager of Publishing, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Author: William Fisk
Hardcover: 67 pages
Dimensions: 10.5 x 0.5 x 12.5 inches