It’s dusk. The sun’s orange glow barely peeks over the bogs of the Everglades as Naomi Fisher adjusts her camera.
For the past two days, she has traveled to the swamps of the Anhinga Trail, and for a third time, she is here to film alligators bend their bodies into a yoga pose, half-submerged in muddy marsh water. Through her lens, she watches the water around the gators tremble as they throat a deep growl. The sound etches shapes and patterns into the water’s surface, and the rumble is so loud it vibrates her chest like the bass in a car stereo system.
This was one of many interactions that Fisher witnessed while working on her most recent project, “Lay of the Land.” She has come full circle as her work will be displayed Friday in UF’s University Gallery through Nov. 15, among Gators once again.
A professional artist from Miami, Fisher has been exhibiting art nationally and internationally since 1999. Nature has been a part of her consciousness since she was a child — traveling with her father, who is a tropical botanist, and collecting plants. One of her father’s closest friends was a botanical illustrator who noticed Fisher loved to draw and encouraged her to keep doing it.
“I feel really fortunate to have had her as a role model growing up, but that also allowed me to enter art through a path that involved nature,” Fisher said.
Since then, her photography, paintings and video have been displayed all over the world, in countries like Germany, Italy and Ukraine.
But now, in the University Gallery, she is displaying photography and video she took while spending a month in the Everglades.
After exploring specific locations in the marshes, sometimes alone, Fisher said, “I did a lot of hiking, just wandering around with my camera and video camera.”
In the video, ashes cover the ground in an area that used to be farmland called Hole-in-the-Donut, deep inside the Everglades, Fisher said. Before a controlled burn turned thriving plants to soot, a group of people brought soil and fertilizer into the swamp to cultivate the land for agriculture. This completely changed the ecology after invasive species started to grow out of seeds that were in the soil, pushing native plants out.
Everglades workers are fixing the problem by “pulling out every single plant there — even the good ones — pulling out all of the soil and sweeping the dirt out until there is nothing but bedrock,” Fisher said. Then they set it on fire.
What she realized was how extreme transformation happens in nature, which became the central theme for the video.
“It’s so interesting how things can shift from one day to the next, even if you’re on the same trail,” she said.
That video will be projected inside the University Gallery and will accompany her photography and Native American artifacts borrowed from the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Director of University Galleries Amy Vigilante said she is excited to display Fisher’s work at UF.
“I love it. I saw one of her videos at the Vizcaya in Miami, and it was fantastic,” Vigilante said. “Digital media is very in right now, so this is a really current show.”
Twenty-one-year-old UF sculpture senior Marla Rosen said art students around campus are also excited to see Fisher’s exhibition because she’s a successful artist who works interdisciplinarily, which means she doesn’t focus on one medium in a show.
Rosen interned with Fisher two summers ago in Miami and helped set up “Lay of the Land” in the University Gallery.
“Creating a large-scale installation is a very interesting way of working,” Rosen said, and being interdisciplinary is “a way of working that a lot of artists are moving toward.”
During the opening reception Friday, Fisher hopes the exhibition engages the audience and compels them to ask questions. The theme of the show is a part of her ongoing investigation into how humans deal with nature.
“For me, it’s taking this sort of extreme transformation that happened in nature … and thinking about that in terms of changes in your own life,” Fisher said.
A version of this story ran on page 11 on 10/3/2013 under the headline "New exhibit explores human relationships with nature"
In the University Gallery, two photos taken by Naomi Fisher are printed on leather, an uncommon surface for printing that she had to special order from New York.
