Riley Fichter

MFA | Sculpture

ARTIST BIO

I am from Baraboo, Wisconsin, and I grew up alongside the Wisconsin River. The watershed of the river was the catalyst for my imagination to flourish. With my brother and friends, we built forts, castles, and designs of grand childhood magnitude. My experiences here convinced me to become an artist. As an MFA in Sculpture, I realize now that sculpture has always felt like the most “real” form of artmaking to me. It is one thing to depict your Excalibur, it is another to make your Excalibur real.

As I look towards the future, I seek to continue to make new bodies of artwork as I pursue teaching, technician, and art management positions. To assist others in achieving the maximization of their creative endeavors alongside the continuation of my own is my primary goal for the foreseeable future. I am excited for the experiences that lay down my path.

ARTIST STATEMENT

All earthlings, all lively matter, are interconnected. My artmaking meditates on the potential for new lifeforms adapting forgotten detritus into complicated bodies. The state of the Body and the life, consumption, and death that permeate our formations is the prime reflection at the nexus of my work.

With material as my medium, I transmute waste products into sculptures whose forms blur the boundary between natural and artificial. These sculptures are installed alongside video projection and immersive elements, such as mylar, to create an intertwined space where a multiplicity of relationships between the artwork, the site, and the viewer emerge. By bringing discards and consumers to the same space, I create disorienting zones where humanity’s unsustainable consumption culture is critiqued and fantasizing for new forms of living persists.

Each of my sculptures are created to have a “digested” aesthetic—each inclusion is brought to the edge of recognizability to appear fully integrated into a new lifeform’s lively matter. This new assemblage shatters humanity as dominant and envisions a future version of ecofeminist Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene: an epoch non-anthropocentric where all life is understood as intertwined. All forms of matter within this present epoch are subject to time’s current and nature’s power, and thus all will change along the cyclical streams of destruction and creation. A course-shift through acknowledgment; coming to terms with the past and reorganizing for the future; embracing coexistence: these are the necessary actions to change, to become-with. We are not human, we are humus. We are neither One nor Other, we are Together.

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Becoming-With (Final Fantasies)

bahamut

mussel and clam shells, polypropylene, plastic bottles, polyethylene tubing, bubble wrap, tennis racquet string, epoxy, VHS tape, Mylar, wax, steel, puck lights, USB cables, video projection | 71” x 36” x 44” | projection size variable | 2024

bahamut detail

mussel and clam shells, polypropylene, plastic bottles, polyethylene tubing, bubble wrap, tennis racquet string, epoxy, VHS tape, Mylar, wax, steel, puck lights, USB cables, video projection | 71” x 36” x 44” | projection size variable | 2024

bahamut detail

mussel and clam shells, polypropylene, plastic bottles, polyethylene tubing, bubble wrap, tennis racquet string, epoxy, VHS tape, Mylar, wax, steel, puck lights, USB cables, video projection | 71” x 36” x 44” | projection size variable | 2024

bahamut detail

mussel and clam shells, polypropylene, plastic bottles, polyethylene tubing, bubble wrap, tennis racquet string, epoxy, VHS tape, Mylar, wax, steel, puck lights, USB cables, video projection | 71” x 36” x 44” | projection size variable | 2024

ultima materia

Bronze, weed-whacking wire, test tubes, polypropylene, zip ties, HDPE, wax, steel cable, steel | 22" x 6" x 108" suspended | 2024

atomos