Celeste Fichter’s first solo exhibition with the gallery features a site specific installation loosely inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea. Using found objects and appropriated imagery, Fichter’s visual poems explore the struggle for creative survival in a contrived world.

Determined to reorder the ordinary, Fichter layers modes of representation to infuse meaning and value into the otherwise common and ubiquitous. Through their unexpected juxtapositions, reconfigured disposable mass-produced objects become surprisingly animate, evoking a wide range of subtle emotions. Sugar packets, vacation snapshots, flashlights and empty frames are transformed and installed relative to an imagined horizon line that runs the length of the gallery, creating a seascape of floating narratives.

In 84 days without a fish, matchsticks walk gangplanks to their watery deaths, two Canadian coins imprinted with sailboats pass in the night, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer is the anchor lying on the sea floor and the text of Old Man and The Sea, methodically rewritten by hand on long overlapping strips of calculator tape, places the viewer on the shore of a receding tide.

Fichter’s humorous and quietly subversive take on the conversation between reality and its representation urges us to reconsider the definition of ‘real’ in a culture of imitation and ‘value’ in a consumer-driven society.

Born in New Jersey in 1965, Celeste Fichter’s recent exhibitions include group shows at SOIL in Seattle (2005), Art & Commerce Emerging Photographers (2004) and Scope, Mueller DeChiara Gallery (2003). Fellowships include MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Centrum in Washington and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Her work is in the private collection of HYPO Veireinsbank, DD Bean and Sons among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn.