November 13-30, 2021

SIMONE FISCHER: “OFFAL”

Offal: the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food/refuse or waste material/refuse from a process/from af ‘off’ + vallen ‘to fall’

Scarcity is an ideology preached within the all-consuming churn of late-capitalist logics of fast food and monocropping; but have we stopped to consider the potentiality of the cast-offs? OFFAL is part-leftovers, part-exhibition, part-model, and part-offering of an alternative food economy and ethics. Multidisciplinary artist Simone Fischer creates sculptures, installations, steel etchings, and social practice works that grapple with the cultural conditionings of food production, consumption, and (re)cyclings. Drawing inspiration from the unwanted animal refuse, Fischer asks us to take a second look at the materials and processes deemed useless within mass food production that could actually sustain us. 

Rearview exit (2019), a fabricated door frame with a photograph printed on chiffon, stands as a centralized entrance into the alternative model of OFFAL within the gallery and visible to the exterior through the Astoria Visual Arts windows. It offers us the chance to cross the threshold to an alternative understanding of consumption, bypassing fast food and corporate advertising. The electric lamp and crushed cart in POWER RELATIONS (2020) greets us at the door, always present within any relationship to food within capitalism. Foodstuff bags small reminders (2021) adorned with flocking and Swarovski crystals litter the ground as mobile modes of transportation alongside Steel handbag (2019) which reconfigure waste byproducts associated with food into permanent containers for reuse. Steel/Steal (2020) and a warning (2021) feature advertising from cans, distressed, serialized, and impressed into a triptych that advocates for alternative, even drastic measures, of survival, and the disparities between rich and poor dining tables, respectively. And finally, Drying Nardello Chilis and Offerings (both 2021), gather and disperse produce from Salvation Gardens, Fischer’s garden response to the COVID-19 pandemic composed from local Oregon seed stock. The works embody abundance outside of corporatized and closed-loop food systems, and Fischer offers them to visitors as gifts of sovereignty. 

Fischer was a recipient of the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Make|Learn|Build grant in 2021 for her solo exhibition "a sermon for crows" presented by after/time Gallery in Portland. Her work has been shown in multiple venues around Portland, including the Lodge Gallery (2018), 511 Gallery at PNCA (2020), and her first solo show 213 at the Glass Gallery at PNCA (2020). She has exhibited internationally at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany (2020). Fischer has a BA in gender studies & philosophy at Portland State University and an MFA in visual studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2020. In October 2019, Simone attended the Caldera Arts Artist in Residence program in Sisters, OR. Simone was the 2021 artist-in-residence at after/time Gallery where she produced her first publication ANTITOURS 1.