CARLY FISCHER

Carly Fischer (Melbourne, Australia 1978) is a sculptural installation artist who currently works between Berlin, Germany and Melbourne, Australia. Since graduating from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 2000 with a BFA Honours in Sculpture, she has exhibited widely in group, collaborative and solo projects and exhibitions in Germany, Australia, the US, the UK, Japan and Austria. Recent exhibitions include Gippsland Art Gallery, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and Helen Gory Galerie, Australia, KWADRAT and MICAMOCA Berlin/Germany, Kunstraum Pro Art, Hallien/Austria, NEXT Fair Art Chicago and Swimming Pool Project Space, Chicago/US. Fischer has received grants such as the Australia Council New Work Grant and featured in publications such as Artlink, Vogue Living Australia, The Age and Die Tageszeitung. She is represented by Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne/Australia and KWADRAT, Berlin/Germany and and has been collected in Germany, Japan, Australia and the US.

Fischer’s installation-based practice explores the increasing globalisation of our contemporary reality, where its very substance is being homogenised, reproduced and sold back to us as commodity and cliché. Working site-specifically in response to different international spaces, she investigates the effect of globalisation on the relationship between place and placeless ness, reality and reproduction. Referencing the street as an often overlooked but potent site of political exchange, she collects the mundane detritus that has been left, dropped and forgotten and replicates it as generic paper models. Commenting on the homogenisation of their environment through mimicry, the models act as perfect but precarious reminders of the shifting reality of globalised space. The disposable ramen bowls of Tokyo, the grungy warehouse junk of Melbourne or the abandoned construction sites and hard rubbish piles of Berlin all become the same deadpan design, both clichés of place and placeless ideals. Using this paper fabrication as a consistent, almost parasitic vocabulary, Fischer explores different forms of presentation and reception through spatial intervention and re-contextualisation; working publicly, where models are re-installed as ‘spatial graffiti’ on the street, and with institutions and galleries where they become museumified ‘ideal models.’ Both interrupting and slipping seamlessly into the space around them, Fischer’s installations act as triggers and trips in the most mundane corners of our everyday, global reality.