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PRESS RELEASE
Vernon Fisher
Heart of Darkness
September 7 through October 20, 2007
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by one of Texas’ most acclaimed artists, Fort Worth native Vernon Fisher. With seven large-scale paintings and one expansive wall installation spanning across 20 feet of gallery wall, Heart of Darkness marks Fisher’s third solo exhibition at Dunn and Brown Contemporary and his most recent body of consolidated work. Heart of Darkness will open with a reception for the artist Friday, September 7, 2007 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM.
Based on elements of Joseph Conrad’s legendary novel Heart of Darkness, Vernon Fisher transforms the gallery both on a visually and intellectually demanding level. True to Fisher’s past bodies of work, this series contains elements of language, an exploration between fiction and reality, as well as an investigation into various levels of consciousness. Heart of Darkness is unique in the fact that it alludes to all of the things a viewer perceives about the jungles of Colonial Africa. Each of the seven large-scale paintings begins with a background consisting of different slices of a detailed colonial map of Central Africa. Fisher then envelops extraneous elements of his own into the canvas; dark and exotic landscapes, myths of white hunters, fictitious Tarzan imagery, and menacing, yet merciful animals.
Throughout the work, Fisher examines the analogies between the journey deep into Africa as depicted by Joseph Conrad, and the inward journey of psychological introspection as delineated by Conrad’s contemporary, Sigmund Freud. The central piece in the exhibition is a detailed wall installation reaching twelve feet high and twenty feet wide. With access to a copy of Conrad’s manuscript of the Heart of Darkness, Fisher reproduces a writer’s draft of the death of Kurtz(an essential character in the novel) with text on the wall, corrected text, notes in margins, 3-D punctuation, and a painting in the center. The wall installation represents the journey into the heart of darkness(both physically and psychologically) as infinitely recursive. Heart of Darkness is a story within a story. Fisher’s visual version continues to add layers, reflecting the continual revision and retelling of the story within a story.
Vernon Fisher currently lives and works in Fort Worth Texas. His work has been shown in major museum exhibitions of contemporary American art, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others. Fisher was also honored with a mid-career, traveling exhibition organized by the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. He was the first Texas artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fisher has received multiple fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Fisher was also included in the prestigious 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Vernon Fisher will be present at the opening reception on Friday, September 7, 2007. Dunn and Brown Contemporary is open to the public on Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 am until 5:00 pm and by appointment. Please contact Sarah Stork at the gallery or via email at sstork@dunnandbrown.com for additional information or to request visuals of the exhibition.