Rob Fischer appropriates the remnants of vernacular architecture and redundant transport vehicles. Discarded, he finds beauty in their decay, and poignancy in their solitude. They are rich with a patina of age, and Fischer uses them to evoke narratives that combine destruction, rebirth, memory, place and a haunting elegance.

Forms derived from a Highway (Part II) uses floorboards reclaimed from a high school gym recombined into a pathway that snakes its way up walls, around corners, along the floor and finally turns in on itself. The markings that once indicated the boundary lines for sports are now redistributed into an all over pattern of markings that recall Modernist painting. Fischer has built into the structure hand made signs found along the road in rural Minnesota. Like small, pitiful billboards they are painted to make declarative statements, complaints or advertisements to drivers passing by on the road (“I wish something would start going right around here”, “Gone to town to buy me some silk gowns and jewelry”, “Looking for a Yorkie Stud. One to borrow,”...).

Bisecting the gallery, Light in August, is a row of 36 airplane propellers displayed standing on their ends at waist height on a long row of narrow display tables. Each propeller was discarded after hitting the runway on miscalculated landings and sustaining irreparable bends and cracks. Made of solid aluminum, Fischer polished each propeller to a mirror finish, a simple gesture that radically elevates them from discarded detritus to elegant totems. Displayed in a row they appear as a long fence of flickering flames.

“The most incidental quality of the “not-told” is the fundamental content of Fischer’s work, where beauty is found in heartbreak and solitude, what he calls a fascination with the “damaged character”. The philosopher Immauel Kant famously wrote that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Fischer assembles skewed, circuitous, oblique timbers into the resonating pathos of his work in the recognition that straight things are merely someone else’s way of telling the wrong story.” (Momin, Shamim M., Rob Fischer: Here is Always Somewhere Else, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006.)

Rob Fischer was recently the subject of solo shows at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York, Max Wigram Gallery in London and Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles. He was also included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and PS1’s “Greater New York”. He is currently preparing for a solo show of large scale sculptures and installations at Arario Gallery, Beijing later this year.