Saxton Fisher (he/him and they/them) is a twenty-one-year-old artist and emerging chemist from the greater Houston area. Saxton has exhibited work in Houston locations including The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Art League Houston, and The Jung Center, as well as the YoungArts Gallery in Miami. Saxton is currently a senior undergraduate chemistry major and laboratory teaching assistant at Reed College, with interests in physical, inorganic, and materials chemistry. They have conducted summer research in a materials and nano chemistry lab at Rice University, making anisotropic gold nanoparticles. Saxton is working to bridge his art and science pursuits to build a cohesive interdisciplinary science-art practice that involves both creating work about chemistry and bringing creative artistic perspectives to scientific research.
PAST WORK:
Fueled by their interest in a resurgence of Dada and modern issues of climate change, over-exploitation, and corporate corruption, Saxton's past sculptural work harbors themes of absurdism, irrationality, and hostility to mimic contemporary "reason." The spectre of the industrial haunts their absurd, threatening, sometimes amusing nail-covered relics. These objects are crafted as artifacts, tools, and weapons that might exist in a pseudo-apocalyptic world where the reign of senselessness marks a breaking point between the clash of abandoned industry and nature. Tongue in-cheek themes of falsely inhabiting cisgender patriarchal bodily and cultural ideals of a "masculine" form are also resonant in this work.