BIRMINGHAM, MICH.- For more than a century and a half, artists and writers have explored altered states of consciousness, finding creativity in delirium and the derangement of the senses. French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote of the effects of wine, opium, and hashish on the mind and senses in Artificial Paradises (1860), describing their beneficial as well as harmful effects. Different drugs and substances have disparate consequences, he argued, changing perception, thought, and action in radically dissimilar ways depending on their strengths and combinations. The aggregate of consciousness-effecting substances available to the artist today has expanded considerably since Baudelaire’s epoch—the drug industry is composed of both legal and illegal branches, and there is no aspect of the self that is safe from psycho-pharmacological manipulation.
Scatters of glass pills and tablets evoke a shrunken Alice-Through-the-Looking Glass state-of-mind in Beverly Fishman’s Artificial Paradise. Each element has a unique pattern and color configuration, allowing viewers to construct their own “cure”. Enamel on stainless steel paintings mirror and refract the spectator, dissolving us into shifting arrays of molecules, capsule forms, neuron spike readouts, and moiré patterns. Acknowledging the ever expanding power of science and the drug industries, these hallucinatory portraits and landscapes question distinctions between organic and mechanical, inside and outside, poison and cure.
Beverly Fishman received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977, and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1980. She subsequently taught at the College of New Rochelle, New York, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she has been Artist-in-Residence and Head of Painting since 1992.
Since 2000, Fishman has had over two-dozen one-person exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Her work has also been included in many thematic exhibitions addressing abstraction, technology, medicine, and the body. Recently she has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Art at Florida State University; Borusan Contemporary (Istanbul, Turkey); Detroit Institute of Arts; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Toledo Museum of Art, Glass Pavilion; and Columbus Museum of Art. Ms. Fishman has been awarded numerous honors including the Toledo Museum of Art’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project (2010-2011), the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2010), Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2005) a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003) a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant (1989), Artist Space Grant (1986/1990), and two Ford Foundation Grants (1979).
Her work has been reviewed and profiled in numerous art magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications, including Huffington Post (2012), Modern Painters (2012), Artnet Magazine (2012), Glass Quarterly (2012), NY Arts Magazine (2012), Wall Street Journal (2009), Art in America (2008), Barbara Maria Stafford’s Echo Objects: The Cognitive History of Images (2007), and Joe Houston and Dave Hickey’s Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s (2007).
Her work may be found in many public collections including Toledo Art Museum, Miami Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Borusan Contemporary, Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Cranbrook Art Museum, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, and the United Nations Embassy in Istanbul. Her works are also included in numerous corporate collections, including Hallmark, Inc., Progressive Insurance, Compuware, UBS Financial Services Inc., Daimler-Chrysler Corporation, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Prudential Life Insurance.
