Samuel Ezra Fisch: Butterflies, Beetles, and Bites
“Within each other is the magic of life. I want to rendezvous with the magical and wonderful reality of each person.”
Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium.
Samuel Fisch, Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residency at the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium.
Describe your Open AIR Residency experience.
During my time as an Open AIR Resident, I spent my time learning from the community, experimenting, and exploring new forms of engagement and creation. I am most interested in and stimulated by community engagement and participatory experiences that do not culminate in physical outputs, but I wanted to allow myself complete freedom to create these types of experiences, including physical outputs. I said yes to everything and bit off way more than I could chew, taking a bunch of unfinished projects and new ideas home with me. I utilized the opportunity to lead a workshop as an exploration of ways to engage community members in the creative experimentation with cooking bugs, and I was very inspired by the participants. I spent a lot of my time in the lab with the animals, learning from the brilliant scientists and naturalists at the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium. I was filled with wonder by the extensive collection of living and pinned insects and arthropods. In the kitchen, I experimented with cooking diverse insect specimens from the lab and explored using the flavors of many edible flowers and nectars. In the studio, I studied butterfly wings under the microscope, and I experimented with painting optical movement and color shifting lenticular fields and patterns on the textured surface of burlap. For my artist presentation I explored a more hands-on and immersive approach to presenting the type of work I make, and I collaborated with the audience on the creation of a new participatory experience. During my free time, I explored Montana and Idaho’s wilderness and natural areas.
Whispers in the Breeze: painted on burlap.
During my residency, I was able to learn and grow so much through experimentation. I was able to work directly with scientists and naturalists in the laboratory setting, and I was granted access to so much knowledge and experience. I experimented cooking new dishes with bugs that I had never had the opportunity to work with. I learned so much from the things that worked, and even more from dishes that were unusual and complete culinary failures. Some of my most memorable experiments were candied cockroach ice cream and my most disgusting first attempt at an earthworm burger.
Candied cockroaches.
During my residency, I felt so supported to try absolutely anything I wanted, and these explorations helped me dive deep into the possibilities of collaborative and participation-based forms of creation that are not focused on physical outputs. I thought of my workshop and my artist presentation as complete artworks in themselves, and they are both two of my most experimental works to date. Participation-based projects are relatively new, and as such, often difficult to critique and define parameters for success, so after my presentation, I was inspired to send out simple surveys to participants in order to collect feedback and attempt to evaluate my methods to assess elements for adjustment and devices that produced effective impact.
Samuel leading a cooking demonstration.
What role does place (both in terms of physical space and community) play in your work, especially during your time at Open AIR?
Making participation-based artworks requires community engagement, and creating event-based work requires access to special resources, such as a kitchen outfitted for a workshop, or a butterfly room as a novel setting for an event filled with wonder. During my residency, I was so fortunate to be given access to materials and spaces in the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium, The Rocky Mountain Garden, and the kitchen at the Missoula County Department of Ecology and Extension. Each project required cross-institutional collaboration and support, and working with all these community institutions was so wonderful. In addition to this incredible institutional support, my projects all require willing and creative community members to participate. I was so inspired by the incredible participants I was fortunate enough to work with from each of these communities and from Open AIR and the greater Missoula area. At the end of the day, it is really the individual community members who come together to make participation-based art happen, and I could not have had a better community to work with.
Samuel explores the Insectarium.
What is the most significant difference between your role as the creator of the work and the experience of those engaging with it?
I want to break down the barriers between artist and audience and shine a light on everyone's creativity. I still exist as an artist, so how do I reconcile these things? I see my role as an artist to be that of an initiator, the first one on the dance floor who gets the dance party started.
I like to think of this sharing through the table metaphor: how does what you bring to the table affect what others bring to the table? I try to bring beautiful perspectives of us to offer visions of hope.
Samuel creates connections through his workshop.
What are you up to now (post Open AIR)?
Over the past decade, I have been intentionally making fewer physical artworks in the pursuit of a more direct exchange between individuals. These explorations have led me to create unusual food and taste experiences, games, parties, treasure hunts, rituals, and rites. Recently, I have felt a desire to release all inhibitions and limiting ideas from my creative practices. During my residencies over the summer and fall, I decided to allow myself to make anything I wanted without limiting my ideas to any material or output. In my time at Open AIR, I experimented in many ways, including starting a series of paintings on burlap. I took home more unfinished projects and ideas than I did finished ones. Being filled with so much inspiration that overflows into my life is one of the best outcomes of a fulfilling season of artist residencies. Since returning to Brooklyn, I have been finishing all the projects that I started during my residency and continuing to think and write about the latest ideas that have come to me over this fruitful period. I feel like the winter after my residency has been a type of chrysalis stage for me, shut away in my studio and working on things in private, to later emerge and unveil them to the world.
Through the Branches: painted on burlap.
How would you describe the evolution of your work, and how do you hope your audience perceives it?
To me, art is the outcry of the human spirit, that which thrives in the face of adversity and sings beautifully in the heart of pain. Throughout the years, I have explored many modalities of making and many various materials and techniques to get to a kernel of the magic I see in life. Through art, the artist points. I have been striving to get to a place where the artworks I create are nonphysical and point to the space between you and me.
I have worked to strip my art bare to get down to the magic of life, and to me, that is other people. For many years I have considered other people to be the most difficult aspect of life, but in that, other people are the meaning of life. Life is about sharing, sharing experiences, sharing ourselves. Everyone is a thousand people, who you were yesterday, who you are with your mom, who you are with your boss, who you are with a dog, who you were ten years ago, who you are when you are sad, who you are when you are in wonder, who you are alone. Each of us have special magical sides, childlike sides, wonderful and amazing sides. How can we share those sides or coax those sides out of the other? Within each other is the magic of life. I want to rendezvous with the magical and wonderful reality of each person. I feel like it is my calling to initiate the dancefloor of life and revel in the wonder and beauty of humans who feel free and open on the stage of existence.
Balloon butterfly making at Samuel’s artist presentation and Butterfly Social.
If I could leave any mark on this world, I would be happy to know that my memory makes people smile and feel more comfortable and inspired to be themselves and connect beautifully with others.
Watch Samuel talk about how he finds inspiration in insects!
