Lauren Davis Fisher, SET TESTS

Lauren Davis Fisher

As part of a tradition of art making that responds to site through large-scale sculptural installation, Lauren Davis Fisher’s work begins with a series of questions about the parameters of a given space. For instance, the artist asks, what are the possibilities of building temporary structures and creating situations on-site, within the context of exhibition display? For SET TESTS (2016), Fisher pursues an interest in the points of integration between sculpture and architecture through a vocabulary of support structures and the forms of support that underlie, prop up, and sustain things and bodies in the world.

A builder in the most literal sense of the word, Fisher is reconstructing and reconstituting her installation periodically throughout the run of the exhibition. While this physical labor and the process-oriented nature of the work are not made visible, the intention is to suggest the changing of forms and the invisibility of labor. On a handful of occasions the artist will work with a team of collaborators to rehearse and perform within the space, bringing the relationship between labor and the constructed environment into greater focus. Fisher repurposes and reuses the building materials that make up this installation to create what she has referred to as a “topographical stage” that is choreographed in such a way that the building materials and support structures are akin to actors, performing their different functions in the time that elapses as part of the exhibition.