Tides

Indigenous Americans are thought to have first settled around what’s now known as Chesapeake Bay nearly 10,000 years ago, following glacial meltwater flooding into the Susquehanna River Valley and, ever since, harboring a unique ecosystem where freshwater and saltwater constantly converge. Ecologically, the bay is home to more than 3,600 species of animals and plants—plus around 18 million people, for whom a relationship to the water has been a constant. It’s also the area where artist Saskia Fleishman was raised.

Fleishman’s current solo exhibition at Baker—Hall, Tides, revisits some of the places that connect to her memories of the area and her lineage in addition to places where similar ecologies feel familiar, mostly along the Eastern Seaboard. “Influenced by a family history deeply tied to ecology and landscape—her father a landscape architect, her grandmother a landscape photographer, and her grandfather a wetland scientist—Fleishman approaches the environment not only as subject matter, but as an emotional and metaphysical archive,” the gallery says.

The artist begins by snapping photos of marshes and shorelines, often bathed in the glow of sunrise or sunset. They have a nostalgic snapshot-like quality, as if taken from a moving boat or casually from the end of a dock, but also the lack of any human-built structures suggests a kind of untouched quality, a timelessness. Fleishman then digitally transfers the image to chiffon, over which she masks swooshing areas to preserve some parts of the surface and delineate others for a textural layer of sand-infused acrylic paint. Collected from the location that the image depicts, the grit in the medium reflects a kind of physical, in-person “proof” of having been there in addition to a curious dialectic between natural, foraged materials and the synthetic basis of her other media.

In person, he works almost function as low reliefs, as light filtering through the translucent chiffon casts shadows onto the wall behind. The effect is one that simultaneously emphasizes the paintings’ flatness and a sense of depth. If not exactly portal-like, the opaque-to-translucent relationship harkens back to analog transitions between scenes on early televisions, as if we’re watching a nature documentary that fades in and out of time and place, presence and memory.

The title of Fleishman’s show, as well as the subject matter, also nods to the relationship between constancy and change, as tides are always changing and yet they are also always occurring—and predictable. Like sunrise or sunset marks the transition from night to day, Fleishman “approaches nature as a living and shifting force—one that mirrors the fleeting yet cyclical nature of human existence.”

Tides continues through July 1 in Miami. See more on Fleishman’s Instagram. ✧

All images courtesy of the artist and Baker—Hall.