o'born contemporary catalogue

Artist Biography

Alex Fischer: www.artofalexfischer.com

Alex Fischer (b.1986, Walkerton, ON) is an artist and empiricist living and working in Toronto, Canada. A sociologist of internet culture, Fischer mediates the visual and theoretical philosophies, which can be accessed through contemporary technology. This extraction and the resulting dissemination are essential to his approach to art-making, which is at once reactionary and projective. He composes his figures and landscapes by digitally assembling visual and conceptual sources in order to explore the syncretic effect of the digital-age.

Fischer's work has been featured in Backflash, Beautiful Decay and Rojo. He is the creator, editor and juror of Sync Resist, released in 2009 through York University. In 2010, Fischer produced his first artist book, Smarter Today published by O'Born Contemporary and Wassenaar. Online publications include CMD J and Doze Magazine.

Fischer graduated from York University with a BFA, honours in visual arts. His work is featured in noted private and corporate collections. Fischer is represented internationally by O'Born Contemporary.

For Smarter Today Alex Fischer offers a human view of futurist landscapes, a view that explores the ideologies and projections of society through the lens of contemporary art.

Composing his figures and landscapes by assembling a variety of visual and conceptual sources Fischer keeps in mind that ideas of the future are inevitably the fastest to change and maintains that human nature is a fallible and susceptible state.

Technological advancement and machine generations have vastly outpaced the tradition of the average human life. As a society, we have adapted to accept the pace at which vast differences and contrasts will influence our modes of being. All projections of which are unpredictable beyond our present context. Today more than ever before, we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks. While this network theory suggests a node's relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness, we find a backlash of reflection on individual circumstance and identity.

The subjects and characters of Smarter Today are reflections on the syncretism that created them. Their exterior identities have been extricated to include all of their precursors. They are heterogeneous and intermingled with their environments, yet maintain their subjectivity in the face of a post-structuralist world.