Sasha Fishman '24 Fixates on Fish in Solo Exhibition at ILY2 Gallery
Visual Arts alum and Adjunct Assistant Professor Sasha Fishman '24 explores aquatic affairs in her new solo exhibition, Shad Mode, at ILY2 Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
While Shad Mode is the culmination of Fishman's research in the Pacific Northwest as an ILY2 Artist in Residence this past summer, the show is a continuation of her long-standing practice of working with living and once-living materials.
In this project, the object of study is fish; or rather, the network of relationships between fish, their ecosystems, and their caretakers. The question at the heart of the work is this: How do humans direct the evolution of a species, and how does a species exist beyond itself?
Merging the natural and synthetic, the installation features sculptures crafted from materials as varied as egg yolk-tanned sturgeon skin, sand-glazed ceramics, UV prints on aluminum, epoxy clay, and lamprey teeth. Though the pieces span the floor and walls of the gallery, they are connected by an aquamarine rug, which creates a visual current that carries the viewer from piece to piece. Encircling the entire exhibition is a fish cannon, a modern technology used to transport fish over the dams that interrupt their historical patterns of movement.
The complicated histories of lamprey and sturgeon de-population, restoration, and education served as Fishman's entrance point to the work. In her three months of research, Fishman engaged with both the Army Corps-run Bonneville Lock and Dam and the tribal-run hatcheries of the Yakama Nation. Often described as "living fossils," Fishman saw the lamprey and sturgeon as markers of the past in an ever-changing present.
This temporal ambiguity is reflected in Fishman's intervention into natural materials, which collapses the species' lineages with modern mechanisms of control and preservation. Pieces like Immortal by Wifi (17 ½" x 15" x 5 ¼", ceramic with slough sand and glaze, egg yolk tanned sturgeon skin, waxed cord, 2025) and The Face That Wakes Me (9 ½" x 7 ½" x 3", egg yolk tanned sturgeon skin, waxed cord, sand cast aluminum, 2025) foreground materiality. While fish skin is abstracted in unnatural architectures, it is still shaped by its ecosystem; the skeletal ceramic structures are infused with sand, and the aluminum is imprinted with the texture of sand.
Each Time You Bathe Me (7 ¾" x 7 ¾" x 4 ½", hexagonal glass block, tubing, river water, lake water, unknown freshwater algae, UV print on aluminum, bubbler, minerals, lamprey teeth, slough sand, 2025) takes the tension between abstraction and material representation to the extreme. While it pumps lake and river water flush with living organisms into a tank mounted on the wall, the tank is not home to a fish, but a print of a fish. In this way, Fishman presents the future archive of current ecological research.
Natural or fabricated, in Shad Mode, systems are ephemeral. While people (artists, researchers, and advocates) may structure these systems, Fishman exposes the paradoxical necessity and futility of these interventions in an inherently entropic world.
Fishman is a Baltimore born, New York based artist. While at Columbia she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. She is a 2024 Puffins Grant recipient as well as a 2024/25 Artist in Residence at Smack Mellon.
Fishman has exhibited her work at Murmurs (Los Angeles), Below Grand (New York), Resort (Maryland), Hesse Flatow (New York), Bozomag (Los Angeles), ILY2 (Portland), The Jewish Museum (New York), and The Indian Ceramics Triennale (New Delhi, India). She has participated in residencies at Smack Mellon (New York), Art Ichol (India), Acre (Wisconsin), NAHR (Italy) and the High Desert Observatory (California). Fishman has presented her work and run workshops at Printed Matter (New York), Genspace (New York), Navel (Los Angeles), Carnegie Mellon, UCLA (Los Angeles), UDenver (Colorado), UColorado Boulder (Colorado), Kenyon College (Ohio), MICA (Maryland), Caltech (California), and CSULB (California).
Shad Mode is on view at ILY2, Portland September 20–December 20, 2025.