The Brooklyn Rail

Occupying the storefront window and back room of a Chinese kitchen supply store on Orchard Street, Sasha Fishman’s solo exhibition Implosion Paradigm Incoming stands ambivalently between an auspiciously camp allegory on ecological catastrophe and a flamboyantly expressionistic manifestation for another world history. Amidst the overflowing crowd on the opening night, I was immediately before a seemingly unnervingly self-organized fountain-esque apparatus, consisting of sand, a rectangular base, a few supporting organs of various sizes and menacingly piercing edges, and a detached stack of flowforms, glowing with a poisonous green shine from elevation, where water pours down. Its internal regulation, illegible to the untrained eye, somehow secures an endless loop that continuously harvests water’s kinetic energy, reminding me of the obscure perpetual motion machines I encountered in the forgotten shadows of historical alchemy encyclopedias. Fortunately, exposed wires and tubes broke my automatic fantasy, suggesting that this theatrical sculpture still abides by the laws of physics in spite of its layered, calculated concealment (look no further than the injection of fiberglass resin onto the original wooden support, now rendered all the more animalistic). In any case, this anxiety-provoking sculpture foregrounds two poles of Fishman’s practice: the mimesis of biology in all its foreign and mutating proliferation and the mining of latent aesthetics in alternative materiality afforded by technological advancements in sustainability research. The result is an elaborated and at times humorous appendix to the “eternal” struggle between nature and culture, further reified by its sensitivity to processual and discursive conditions.

In the back room, allusions to conspiratorial magic and pataphysics continue in a maze of make-believe and plausibility conjured up from fantasies of cyborgian wasteland. Amidst a dazzling, causal display of—and convoluted interplay between—unsympathetic wall works and implicated stage props, a hovering tower-like sculpture anchors the exhibition. Dotted by malicious overgrowth of fungus, the solitary sculpture’s aged body struck me as a quasi-metaphysical ladder whirling into far-flung localities, acutely aware of its own implied infinitude (would it rise above the ceiling height should all obstacles be removed?) and lack of functionality. Unfastened from a recognizable context, the mycelium corpus spirals into air, casting a shadow of doubt on other works’ dubious claims to a lack of history (all dated 2023!). Perhaps they were crudely untethered from a ruinous landscape far from human society as well. Parts of the sculpture are frail, stretched thin, and of impoverished depth, replaced by some flimsy mucus or beehive-like matter, made from bioplastic and tanned salmon skin. Other parts are thickly distraught with textured investment, crumpled, folded, and bent over to resemble concrete backbone laid bare by the erosion of time.

Humbly sitting in the corner, Can’t feel my fingers is a grotesquely twisted womb-adjacent open chamber that seeks to close itself off to no avail. Its stretched suspension of exposed interior/exterior, wrought with unsettled negotiations between gravitational pull that blocks uninhibited movement and the intimate need for sensuous tentacles to continue their lines of flight, houses a semi-translucent arthropod awaiting the final transfiguration into full grandeur.

More sculptures occupy the room and each has an emphatically bleached and veiny surface, palpitating with formal attunements to their posthuman vitality and incised with the exhausted pleasure of becoming. Evoking a dried riverbed or fossilized tissues, they marshal erected argumentations, roughly taking on the shape of horns and antlers, proficient in the art of absorbing solar energy and its life-giving mystique. These appendages invite additional critical analysis as they fail to blend into the remaining structure. Time is disjointed here. Each sculptural assemblage stands on its own as a relic from a deep time crushed by waves of obsolescence, only connected to the erratic wreckage of resource extraction that is the present through patterned adornments visibly belonging to industrial modernity. Uninterested in precision or identification, they confer a tactile affectivity, privileging the eliciting of radical perspectival shift over human appropriation of the incessant new. Their sinuously expounded contours register the ecstasy of (mis)communication: one work leans inward nonchalantly and is no longer (or never has been) eager to assert its troubled presence. Its drained surface refuses the dissecting gaze of curious spectators whose intruding psychologization meets its improbably stubborn retreat from the appearance of immediacy.

Electricity sometimes is a lushly disordered cache of densely sedimented demarcations arrested in a stuttering moment of dissolution. Its hazy yet sinewy outline unfurls between a spinal exoskeleton, churned by time and unburdened by zoological taxonomy, and a rerouted curvature of conductive copper encircling the swerving formation. Catalyzing a limbo of bio-machine hybridity where electricity cannot exceed its conditions of legibility or be reduced to its technical substrate, Electricity sometimes steers away from tropes of efficient production for a far more generous and generative understanding of energy circulation.

Mounted on the floor, And really good at transporting—a canal falling out of maintenance, a deserted Roman bridge, or perhaps a worn-out fish ladder—is connected to Unchlorinated, a fleshy water wheel glazed by hot volcano spring, through the spectral motion of water, as if powered by a phantasmatic magnetic field, always in deferral from final destination. Their exchange of energy is reserved, defying my eager anticipation that a revelatory intervention emerges from such opaque embodiment. Mobilizing the prowess of esotericism, the constellation enlists me to take a leap of faith in animism, leaky points of departure toward renewed environmental consciousness.

Fishman’s works do not aspire to a mythologized return to untainted nature but rather are peripheral gestures that reconfigure despondent debris into dark objects beyond the sovereign of the Anthropocene. In attempts to dislodge the logic of accumulation and denaturalize topologies of capital, these sculptures, punctured and splintered by apocalyptic decay, suggest the possibility of recuperating technology’s utopian potential and chart pathways seeping out of parameters of the current techno culture.