Rob Fischer at Elizabeth Dee - New York

Art in America, May, 2003 by Edward Leffingwell

In a Brooklyn warehouse room the size of his gallery, Rob Fischer built an extravagant, Mad Max sort of prairie schooner made up of oddly potent, scavenged things. When the untitled 2002 work was finished, he disassembled it and trucked it to the high-rent trailer park of Chelsea, where he put it back together again at Elizabeth Dee. The principal, gabled cabin is floored with modernist-patterned linoleum and exposed steel, the exterior brushed with a gray-green wash of paint. The cabin's chassis is attached at its farthest extremity to a pickup truck, the bed of which is filled with earth, wild grasses, desiccated leaves, two oil drums and an air compressor and hose, and surmounted by a jerry-built, gabled greenhouse. A metal door at one end opens the trailer's interior to the pickup bed, while attached to another side is a vertically extended metal boat capped by a glass-paned roof, and bolted to the opposite side is the wreckage of a small aircraft. Fischer's articulation of mismatched parts suggests that the boat and aircraft ruins are intended to provide balance to the whole.

With one trailer hitch jacked up at the far end of the chassis and another resting on an oil drum at the near, Fischer's claustrophobic shack is further stabilized by additional jacks and concrete blocks stuffed beneath it. A tower of plain oak chairs reaches for the ceiling like a rickety ladder to gallery heaven, supported at a juncture of the extended metal cabin and the greenhouse of the pickup's bed by an armature of rusted angle iron. As though to redefine the gallery space, a post-and-lintel structure of paint-striped oil barrels obscured the gallery's street windows, while a covering of cardboard concealed the back wall. Recalling in its unfurnished economy the more practical architectural speculations of Andrea Zittel, and also reminiscent of Nancy Rubins's assemblages of water heaters and airplane parts, this funky, rolling shelter adds up to a dysfunctional 1,500 square feet of more or less accessible interior. The desolate ghost of a Dust Bowl wind seemed to shiver around and through this project like the prairie grasslands of Minnesota, where the artist was born in 1968.

In a separate viewing room, Fischer offered three Lilliputian stacks of chairs in welded bronze in spans of three, six and eleven chairs, all untitled, all 2002. A 4-by-5-foot unframed drawing of the same year, Untitled (Oil Drums), presents a graceful line of oil drums floating on an expanse of heavy paper that was attached with clips to the gallery wall. Like his bronze towers of chairs, it served as a reminder of Fischer's sculptural project as self-contained site.