Morgan Fisher: Conversations

Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher (b. 1942, Washington, DC) first achieved widespread recognition in the early 1970s for a body of experimental films that deconstructed the language of cinema both as physical material and as a set of production methods and technical procedures. Fisher’s films collectively reveal those aspects of the medium that conventional films make a point of concealing: the camera and other equipment, the presence of production assistants and director, the editing process, even the standard length and gauge of the film stock itself.

Since the late 1990s, Fisher has focused his attention on the problems and possibilities of painting, questioning and reframing the subtle conventions of the medium with an equally rigorous self-reflexivity. Fisher’s paintings and painting installations investigate systems of perspective and color relations; the shape, thickness, or orientation of each painting; the position of the viewer; and especially the relationships between paintings or groups of paintings and the architectural spaces they occupy. For his exhibition at the AAM—the first American museum exhibition devoted to his painting practice—Fisher has conceived of a new body of work, to be installed in relation to temporary, modular structures based on the architectural plans for the New Aspen Art Museum.