JULIA FISH: Transcriptions, Apparitions

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Transcriptions, Apparitions, its fourth solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist, Julia Fish. The exhibition presents new work by the artist including a three-part site-specific intervention, works on paper, and a singular photographic object, underscoring Fish’s longstanding investigation into the architectural and perceptual visualization of inhabited and transitional ‘living’ spaces.  

For more than three decades, Fish’s home on Hermitage Avenue has been an active site of inspiration and research, as architectural elements of the house and studio have become subjects for the artist. The physical features of the domestic space and workspace function as an evolving language of material forms through which Fish continues to explore memory and quotidian experience. In Transcriptions, Apparitions, this vocabulary is extended into the rooms of David Nolan Gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse space. 

The exhibition’s title reflects certain operative terms within Fish’s practice: to transcribe, to inscribe, and to appear. These actions, rooted in both music and language, describe how experience moves from one form into another. Just as a score is reinterpreted for other instruments, Fish translates and transcribes her lived experience of the house—its thresholds, floors, stairs, as well as its light, and spatial characters—into forms where these attributes are visually structured per her own complex logic. The works become manifest as ‘evidence.’

For this exhibition, the artist reengages the encoded six-color ‘Hermitage spectrum’ that has offered a directional-spatial orientation for her work since 2009. In addition, three distinct new works on paper are composed within grey grounds—grey, for Fish, being a color that receives or accepts a proposition—a liminal field that mirrors the present moment.

A key work for this exhibition, Apparition : six Hermitage Thresholds @ 24 East 81st Street (2024-25) is the result of generative iterations, presented in the form of a collage-based photographic object—an apparition of the south gallery itself as experienced and perceived by the artist. The work embeds the ‘Hermitage’ thresholds into an image of the gallery, mirroring the orientation of one room within Fish’s home. Archival elements recur: the hearth, the doubled perimeter lines of parquet flooring, and the six-color logic. The image expands Fish’s longstanding use of photography as source and research material, here approached from the position of a painter. The result is an image that overlays perception, memory, and spatial considerations—disorienting and reorienting the viewer—as if the gallery is confronting its own imagined counterpart, or perhaps, confronting itself. 

Another term, intervention, is key to her site-specific works, which Fish describes as an act or action within a specific location or situation—developed, for example, by visual adjustment, addition, substitution, or subtraction. For Fish, an intervention is a kind of inscription. Transcriptions, Apparitions includes three projects—Hearth II [ ghost ], Leak [ ghost threshold ], and Evidence—a continuation of Fish’s episodic history with site-specific practice, which began in Iowa City in 1985 and has continued in subsequent projects in Rome, New York, Sydney, and Chicago. 

Fish resists and reorients the conventional definition of site-specific work and its prevailing expectation that such projects involve a space elsewhere—a public place, an institution, or a location that is removed from the artists’ daily life. For Fish, her home is unequivocally ‘a site’ and has functioned as a primary source and context since 1992. In Transcriptions, Apparitions, she extends this approach by activating the gallery space in dialogue with her own, owing in part to their similar domestic scale—proposing that a site may not always be singular. The act of ‘importing the language’ of familiar, living space into David Nolan Gallery redefines site-specificity as an intimate process in which a place generates work, the work generates further iterations, and the boundaries between home and art become concomitant. 

– Tharini Sankarasubramanian