ART REVIEW : Fisher Explores the Meaning of Life in Indifferent World

No matter how intensely you concentrate on any element in one of Vernon Fisher’s mix-and-match constellations of images, words and objects, its meaning never settles out of the swirl of loose references and drifting hints that comprise the Texas-based artist’s exploration of civilization’s tenuous place in the face of indifferent nature.

At Mark Moore Gallery, the crisp pictures Fisher paints, diagrams, scrawls, stencils and builds--and then erases, smudges and obscures--aren’t especially optimistic. Nor, for that matter, are they particularly pessimistic. The layered condensations simultaneously sustain both readings.

Fisher’s exhibition is titled “The Heart of Darkness,” after Joseph Conrad’s grim exploration of over-ambitious conquest and Sigmund Freud’s concurrent speculations about the limitations of rationality. It embodies a dreamy, trance-like state in which aggressive quests are regularly overwhelmed by the inhospitable surroundings in which they take place.

In one work, a fiberglass limb lays across an army cot, accompanied by a fragment of text suggesting that pain is the only path to consciousness. In “Private Africa,” Fisher has painted realistic images of a waterfall and a parachutist over an outdated map of the colonized continent drawn on a blackboard, obscuring the differences between social space and inner sentiments.

In three other blackboard works, mushroom clouds, stylized Mickey Mouses and clusters of coral float in and out of focus, sometimes clearly appearing and at other times blurring into gray erasures. A lyrical narrative printed on the wall tells a tale in which maps and reality fail to correspond, leaving a couple lost in a strange and potentially dangerous environment.

Fueled by a deep appreciation of the many ways things can go wrong, despite one’s best plans, Fisher’s realism flirts with absurdity but holds back from such drama. For these graceful works, ordinary occurrences are weird enough.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.