NAOMI FISHER

The artist was  commissioned to create a new site-responsive ceramic installation for the exhibition in Miami. Produced during her recent residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, the new work references the fecundity of Miami’s natural landscape, the richness of mythological and surrealist imagining while maintaining its foundation in the artist’s public art practice that pulls from Miami deco architecture. Specifically for this exhibition, Fisher returned to the iconic symbol of the mermaid or the water nymph as both seductive and the grotesque, hyper-sexualized dreamy and the cause of a watery death. Her work is grounded in artifice and design, particularly for architectural facades, and yet the imagery, textures, colors and glazing ooze with sex, desire and repulsion.

Fisher was born and raised in Miami, where a wild and untamed tropical environment served as the backdrop to the population’s tendency toward artifice and materialistic excess. She frequently explores this culture clash in her work through the lens of feminist theory and surrealist art. Within her work, the science and politics of climate change and how we navigate the natural world is informed by a childhood going on plant collecting expeditions around the world with her botanist father. Over the past 20 years, her work has spanned painting, drawing, performance, photography, video, and site-specific installation, often in collaboration with dancers. Recently she has started accepting commissions for permanent large-scale public art projects, the first of which is a frieze that is a permanent part of the architecture of the Rose McQuillan Art Center at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.