WAITING ROOMS
The unifying theme of these large-scale, mixed media paintings on paper is waiting, one of the most common of human experiences, whether it be in the checkout line of a supermarket, a doctor's office or a traffic jam. The paintings are what I call, 'interior landscapes,' set in a variety of indoor and outdoor waiting room spaces, and populated by ordinary seeming objects, most particularly chairs, which serve as place markers for human presence. However, under the aesthetically pleasing, seductive surfaces of the pastoral and familial spaces, lurks a very precarious environment in which life is a crapshoot: World War II German tanks roll around menacingly suggesting an ominous sense of violence, sinister forests border pleasant suburban patios, and cattle cars sit on tracks outside the window. The waiting rooms ultimately invite the viewer to reflect on personal and collective fate, roads not taken, memories of people and places long gone and choices yet to make.
"Fishman's paintings are a mix of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the real with the surreal. And they radiate an ominous sense of violence and a nagging awareness of history as a nightmare from which the world is trying to awake...All of her artfully applied "junk," as Fishman humorously calls the materials she collages to the work's surface, gives the paintings' seductively fashioned shapes and colors, a hard, gritty, contemporary edge."
Owen McNally, Arts Critic, The Hartford Courant
Fishman's works on paper broach the historical rather than the mythical and do so in a language of remarkable force, especially considering that her central image is something as mundane as a straight-backed chair...the most impressive aspect of these works is their brittle, almost cartoon-like resistance of easy sentimentality. There is considerable wit, presumably intentional in Fishman's choice of chairs as a touchstone. Certainly it turns Matisse's "painting should be like an easy chair" modernism on its ear... Somehow, in focusing on suggestive details, surprisingly placed, Fishman manages to get to us."
Patricia Rosoff, Art Critic, The Hartford Advocate