12 color CNC woodblock print with 8 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 #2 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
Where Calm #1 opens the inquiry, Calm #2 deepens it. Beverly Fishman’s examination of color as a physiological and cultural force does not resolve across these two works. It accumulates. The same formal intelligence is at work here, the same deliberate combination of natural and non-natural hues engineered to trigger sensations of taste, smell, mood and emotion before the rational mind has had time to intercede.
The title Calm, repeated across both editions, carries an increasingly complex weight. Calm, in Fishman’s practice, is never simply a state of rest. It is a condition produced, managed and distributed by the medical technologies and capitalist industries that have quietly reshaped our organic natures. To look at these works together is to sit with that paradox: the possibility of relief alongside the awareness of what produces it.
Calm #2 could best be understood alongside its companion Calm #1. Collected as a pair, the two works form a sustained and quietly unsettling meditation on our contemporary condition.
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.
