12 color CNC woodblock print with 4 colors of screenprint printed on Coventry Rag 335 gsm paper mounted to 4 ply museum board
$7,000–$7,845Price range: $7,000 through $7,845
Color is very material to Fishman, often triggering sensations of taste, smell, mood, and emotion. She combines natural and non-natural hues to encourage viewers to think about the ways in which our organic natures have been changed through medical technologies and the capitalist industries in which they are enmeshed.
Signed, numbered, and dated by the artist on the reverse. All Haystack editions come with a Certificate of Authenticity.
About the Artwork
Color is very material to Fishman, often triggering sensations of taste, smell, mood, and emotion. She combines natural and non-natural hues to encourage viewers to think about the ways in which our organic natures have been changed through medical technologies and the capitalist industries in which they are enmeshed. Beverly suggests our contemporary condition offers us both tremendous possibilities and great dangers. She believes that learning how to navigate both aspects of this state of affairs is one of the most pressing issues of our time.
Calm #1 was printed in collaboration with the artist and PS Marlowe Studios, Asheville, NC. Master printer Phil Sanders worked with Beverly to determine and implement the printing processes that would best achieve her vision. Each print was created by a combination of woodblock and screenprinting.
Curator's Note
Beverly Fishman has spent decades examining what color does to the body before the mind has time to intervene. In Calm #1, that inquiry arrives with characteristic precision. The title is not ironic, but it is not straightforward either. Calm, in Fishman’s world, is a condition mediated by technology, by industry, by the pharmaceutical systems that have reshaped our relationship to our own organic natures. The colors in this edition appear not only minimal and calm, but can also trigger.
Fishman combines natural and non-natural hues with the deliberateness of a researcher and the instincts of a painter. The result is a work that operates simultaneously on a sensory and an intellectual level, provoking sensations of taste, smell, mood and emotion while asking the viewer to consider how those sensations have been shaped by forces far beyond their control. The possibilities and the dangers, as Fishman sees it, are one and the same.
About the Artist
Beverly Fishman (b.1955, Philadelphia, PA) appropriates the forms of pharmaceuticals, fragmenting and recombining the shapes to create larger assemblages – drug cocktails, if you will – that evoke our complex relationships to ideas of sickness and health.
