Sasha Fishman at Murmurs

Seven video monitors are attached to the sculpture, playing four-channel videos of footage collected from a range of sources: the Salmon River Fish Hatchery in Altmar, NY, which works to conserve the salmon population and stock local rivers, and a trip the artist took to Sarasota, Florida. There are images of maritime tourism from a cruise ship in Alaska where the artist saw preserved salmon skin for the first time, scientific laboratory research, salmon processing, and the artist sensuously dressing herself in salmon skin on the beach. The camera zooms in and out, far and near, suggesting a diaristic intimacy and casualness. Yet the editing is mechanical and efficient, the color correction clinical. The narrative—part nighttime surveillance tape, part instructional video, part documentary, and part gory snuff—has an emotional intensity that revels in the dynamics of consumption and dependence. In one scene, the artist, half- naked and covered in salmon skin, goes into the water to swim, her gestures obscured by the darkness and made all the more erotic by the lingering camera. This cuts to a bloody scene depicting the dissection of salmon fish for a clearing and staining process to make the fish transparent. Another shot matter-of-factly documents a dead fish being doused in a chemical perseverant. In the end, viewers find themselves seduced by the confusion of boundaries between self and other, desire and repulsion, intimacy and violence, as Fishman offers an intimate view into the moral ambiguity of interacting with our animal others.

Sasha Fishman, Resurrectura (installation view) (2024-25). Image courtesy of the artist and Murmurs. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.