Monuments to the everyday – Carly Fischer

Carly Fischer’s work is symbolic of what she sees as the encroaching fakeness of ‘real’ life, the disposable culture of consumerism, the mass-produced items that infiltrates our daily life.

Fischer is one of three artists featured as part of the Monuments to the everyday exhibition on display at Realm Artspace until 15 July.

Just like the old Mason jar which sprung onto the café scene as part the ‘green movement’ of using sustainable products, Fischer points to the once humble plastic milk crate, now factory produced by retail corporates bowing to consumer trends and selling back under the guise of ‘sustainable’ palette furniture.  

“I’m interested in the way corporations tap into whatever kind of contemporary drive there is at the time as a way of marketing their products. It’s this strange circulation of objects from real movements of resistance to commodification,” Fischer explains. 

Drawing on the protest song by Australia’s Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody, Fischer’s six-piece collection (From Little Things Big Things Grow) featured at ArtSpace’s Monuments to the Everyday exhibition questions whether cultural resistance can escape being appropriated, commodified and sold back to us as a gentrified lifestyle package.

By using scale modelling, Fischer attempts to ‘reactivate’ people’s experiences of everyday, mundane objects. Products and cultural objects are referenced, reassembled, remixed and reconstructed as curious hybrid sculptural propositions. 

For example, If you’re going to try, go all the way, 2017, we see the pairing of various objects – a yoga mat, coconut water carton, Lynx Africa deodorant bottle, and Polynesian souvenirs popular in the 70s in Australia as a fragment of the past. 

Fischer describes how, ‘There is a contradiction in a specifically Australian context of being drawn to other indigenous cultures whilst ignoring our own’. 

Through collecting objects, stories, stereotypes and mythologies, Fischer’s installations weave found and fabricated fragments into alternate narratives, and reflect on how corporations market products towards culturally, environmentally and politically aware Australians. 

From catchy slogans to campaigns designed to instill a ‘good feeling’ when buying eco-friendly products, Fischer also highlights how consumers are drawn in through subliminal marketing messages that influence them without their conscious knowledge. 

“In re-contextualising and reconstructing them into these models and replicas, people do re-experience them because they’re drawn into their craftiness and ambiguity. It opens a portal for people to look at these objects closer than they would the actual objects and then re-experience them in their everyday environment,” she says. 

Carly Fischer is a Melbourne-based sculptural and audio installation artist whose work is held by numerous private and public collections. She has exhibited widely in Australia, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, the US, the UK and Japan, through solo, group and collaborative projects. 

Read more about Carly Fischer

Monuments to the everyday is on until Sunday 15 July at ArtSpace at Realm, Ringwood Town Square, 179 Maroondah Highway.

For more information visit the Arts in Maroondah website.