2005-03 Fischer, Rob Artforum.com Review 217 words
In his first solo show with this gallery, Minnesota native Rob Fischer presents wonderful sculptures, pretty good painted photographs, and just-OK paintings that all up the ante on his peculiar blend of high plains anomie and rural ecology. He combines the whiteout alienation of Fargo with the psychological dislocation of Bruce Nauman's early corridor sculptures. Fischer calls his version of those freestanding drywall pressure chambers "chapters," and they are simultaneously linked and bisected (at head height) by a copper pipe carrying the water that feeds the "cultivated swamp" of Summery (Goodyear Ecology), 2004Ð05. The "rural ecology" comes to the fore not only in the tall grasses that accompany that work's non-site tire-track transposition or Greenhouse No. 4 (Repetitive Cycles), 2004-05, but also in his predilection for recycling. Tucked into the corner of the room is Abstract Sculpture, 2004-05, which contains elements of the large glass-walled dumpster he exhibited at last year's Whitney Biennial; near the front door is an upended, hand-made dumpster that, last summer, was similarly lined in glass and sat, diagonally, at Mary Goldman Gallery in Los Angeles. Now, rusty and fitted with mirrors, it greets viewers with fragmented pictures of themselves and is the proscenium arch through which you must pass to enter Fischer's world, which is at once entropic and creatively regenerative.


Rob Fischer
Installation view
2005
Courtesy of the artist and Cohan and Leslie, New York