Bruno David Gallery - St. Louis contemporary Art Gallery

BEVERLY FISHMAN
Pharmako - Xanadu (Project Room)

In this exhibition, Beverly Fishman delves into the cultural implications and consequences of pharmaceutical overload while enticing the audience with the pills' sleek visual seductiveness. As an artist, Fishman has long engaged with questions of art, technology and the body. Through this work, she ponders why a seeming cure to our hectic days and emotional strain is also, in effect, a poison. Her enveloping milieus of intense fluorescent colors, repeating patterns, and sizable scale deliberately affect the viewer on both a physical and intellectual level.

The Pharmako sculptures evoke the overt appeal of the chemical compounds frequently used to alter our minds and bodies. They represent a broad spectrum of over-the-counter, prescription, and illegal pills-all of which have entered an arena of quasi-designer products that combine technology with attractive aesthetics (Eldepryl, Valium, Ziac, Ativan, Tegretol, Tenuate, Nolvadex, Maxzide, Fosamax, Zebeta). In particular, Extasy pills display fun, pop icons that subsequently attract and associate a young user with the branded identity of the pill's maker. Overall, the resultant array of pills is as expansive in coloration as their real life counterparts are in function. Fishman's Xanadu Series of chrome pill sculptures takes the seduction and inclusion of the viewer to another level with gleaming exteriors that mask their dangerous possibilities. The viewer can be seen in the artwork itself through his mirrored image, thus consolidating his identity with the pill and its resultant effects. Through different angles and reflections, each of us is affected by the work in a unique manner, a visual metaphor for the varying physical and mental consequences the same pharmaceutical can have on any of us.

Fishman has had over a dozen one-person exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Her work has also been included in many thematic exhibitions addressing abstraction, technology, medicine, and the body. Ms. Fishman has been awarded numerous honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2005) a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003) a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant (1989), an Artist Space Grant (1986/1990), and a Ford Foundation Grant (1979).

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