Crickett Fisher is a multidisciplinary artist from Rhode Island working in printmaking, drawing, and assemblage. She earned her BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island College. Her solo exhibition Unstill Life was displayed at the historic Providence Art Club in May 2023. In 2024 she was selected to be part of the Internship and Award Program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center where she went on to work as a studio assistant in painting, printmaking, and photography. She intends to pursue a Master of Fine Arts.

In my drawings and prints, I work with signifiers of female sexuality – bulges, crevices, and limbs – rearranging them into landscapes of flesh. I play with what it means to be made into a series of objects via this still life-ification of the female nude portrait. Hyperreal color is built through layers of pastel marks, gesturing to both the bright, glossy world of the digital and the anal intellectual tradition of figurative art.

The female body is one of the most prolific art historical subjects: it is a default object onto which “art” is projected. Most nudes are not portraits, but studies in possession and desire. In its endless erotic depictions, the female body becomes little more than a series of transposable blobs, like the interchangeable breasts and buttocks of surrealist and famous pervert Hans Bellmer’s dolls. In art history and pornography alike, the image of woman transcends a singular body yet remains something less than an individual: a set of symbols, a composite animal.

I work from photos as both model and photographer. The digital age fosters a voracious consumption of one’s own image—the body is rendered still life object, erotic puppet, dissociated from the self by tireless self-scrutiny. Images are in endless supply. It is not necessary to imagine. 

I am interested in how images mediate between reality and imagination, as well as the blurred boundary between object and agent. My work explores the beautiful, absurd, erotic, and disturbing possibilities that emerge when bodies are fragmented.

Figurative Work

Techno-baroque is the word I use to describe my still life drawings. “Baroque” because of the density of visual information. “Techno” because of the integration of technologies such as photography and Photoshop into my process, but more so because of the images’ visual electricity. An unnatural glow, hyper-saturated color, and impossible distortions of space mark these works as products of the digital age.

Still life as a genre probes the weirdness of existing as a thing observing other things. I cannot deny allegations of symbolism in these pseudo-figural tableaus. They are riddles as much as they are psychedelic explorations of light and color.

Photography and editing are an integral part of my process, both as rapid-fire compositional experimentation and a way of distorting space with Photoshop’s blundering hand. But a photo connotes reality—tampered with, but nonetheless physical. A drawing declares itself as artifice. Just as sight is an illusion of biology, simply the brain’s way of interpreting light waves, representational art is a layered illusion. 

Still Life Work