ILY2 is proud to announce Shad Mode, an exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist and researcher Sasha Fishman.The show is a continuation of her interest in biomaterials, toxicology, and energy harvesting as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. Driven by a fascination bordering on fixation with fish as both subject and object, Fishman’s practice prods the relationship between fish, their ecosystem, and their caretakers, asking the question: How do humans direct the evolution of a species, and how does a species exist beyond itself?

Often described as “living fossils,” lamprey and sturgeon exist in a liminal space as markers of the past in an ever-changing present. Fishman reflects on this temporal ambiguity by making the gallery a site of collapse, merging media and mediums to present the tenuous lineage of these species with modern mechanisms of control, and experiments in preserving them after death.

Born out of three months of research in the Pacific Northwest, immersing herself in the varying practices of the Army Corps-run Bonneville Lock and Dam, and the tribal run hatcheries of the Yakama Nation, Fishman uses the complicated history of lamprey and sturgeon de-population, restoration, and education as a point of entrance.

Sculptural components mimic the architectural vernacular of information guides, replacing dated educational language with the tautly stretched skin of sturgeon, a tongue-in-cheek nod at how ecological information is presented in soft, digestible ways that create distance between human and animal. Encircling the exhibition is a fish cannon, a modern method of transporting species over the dams that have altered their million-year-old movements. Ceramic wall works mirror the skeletal structure of sturgeon (or, in the case of lamprey, allude to their lack of one), while aluminum prints documenting Fishman’s research are future relics of our present ecological knowledge.