Written by Miles Stemp
In land art there is a tradition of use of space, and in particular a reaction to space. We see in these works a physical response to the space. With Michael Heizer the space was simply a large track of land that he could bulldoze, reshape, and dominate. For Richard Long the space represented more of an emotional attachment to space where his circles of rocks and his walks manifest themselves as attempts to become part of the space. Stephen Fisher creates a different dialogue, a different stream, than those land artists of the 1960s.
With Fisher’s work there is a use of space and an investigation of space, but not real space, more like a non-space space. Fisher references place in a context removed from its original situation. He engages the non-placeness of the map and how it references place, but isn’t actually a physical thing. With his work there is as much care given to the map as there is given to the physical map itself (i.e. the paper it is on). His wall sculptures address this idea as he exaggerates the paper’s physical size to gigantic proportions; a scaling up effect similar to the scaling down land goes through to be transposed onto a map.
Another very interesting avenue in Fisher’s work is the map mash ups. Just think of it as if Girl Talk was a cartographer. Fisher takes the real features on the map, things like countries, provinces, landscape features and mashes them up, in essence creating a new space out of existing spaces. Unlike Heizer who dominates a relatively small piece of land and presents to scale, Fisher uses the entire world on a 3 by 2 foot piece of paper. The question is (and I know Tony Sherman would ask this): Is Fisher then playing god? But the thing is, I don’t think it really matters.