Saskia Fleishman / St. Michaels and Cape Elizabeth

About Saskia Fleishman:

Saskia Fleishman, born in 1995, graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a B.F.A. in painting. She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, PADA Studios, ChaNorth and Trestle Studios, and a curator in residence at Otis College of Art and Design. Fleishman’s work has been exhibited in a recent solo exhibition at Silo 6776 in Hope, New ItalyI PA, and in group exhibitions across the United States, Italy and Portugal. Fleishman is based in Philadelphia, PA.

“My current body of work, including both painting and ceramic sculpture, is generated from landscape photographs taken on recent trips and images sourced from my family’s collection taken around the tidewater Chesapeake Bay area.

In the paintings, these photographs are recomposed as geometric abstractions derived from the color studies in Josef Albers', ”The Interaction Of Color”. This process involves tilting the image, flipping the horizon line, cutting out a part of the landscape, or creating colored transparencies with chiffon. These gestures serve to suggest an alternative way of thinking and identifying our memories embedded within landscapes, where nothing is absolute and everything is relative. The paintings pair flat and smooth masked airbrushed gradients with textural materials such as sand and burlap.

Unlike the systematically constructed paintings, the ceramics vessels are organic and built with improvisation. These sculptures, textured and sprayed with underglaze, mimic swatches of the natural world. The textures reference grass, waves, or rocks and the sprayed color creates light, shadows, and gradients covering the surface. The vessels evoke a sense of home within these landscapes.

This body of work highlights the malleability and impermanence of our predetermined systems of seeing, memories, and psychologies over time. It forms a space to contemplate points in our past, perception, conditioning, and our relationship to the life cycles of the landscapes we inhabit and passthrough.”