Alison Jacques is pleased to announce an exhibition of graphite works on paper by Dan Fischer (b. 1977, Brooklyn, New York). The show, Fischer’s third at the gallery, follows a two-decade survey of work at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York.
There is an assumption that we are our own people: that life is a protracted exercise in self-determination. Our decisions are our own; our ethics, our own; our aesthetic preferences, the culmination of years of autonomous deliberation. But all is influence, all is imitation. Unless one pursues a truly ascetic existence, the present – and, by association, the future that it foreshadows – is but a continuous reinterpretation of the past. The events, experiences and innumerable creative gestures of bygone eras are preserved in the workings of the present day. ‘Je est un autre’, wrote Arthur Rimbaud in his letters, a phrase that lives on via two common translations: ‘I is someone else’; ‘I is another’.
