This work, like much of Fike’s oeuvre, offers full sensory experience incorporating sight and sound elements in performative collage. Stages began with the image: light casting shadows of trees through the windows of his family’s home, that of his father’s childhood. This meditation of those fleeting moments provides a multi-layered installation of natural elements, machines, the body, and the mind in an intentionally unrefined manner. The cast shadows would typically pique one’s curiosity, in life, one is cued to find the source out the window, but here it is very easily discovered that it is not true branches, but a raw facsimile produced by a combination of machine and man-made leaves attached to branches swaying in a fan-generated breeze. In this instance, the artifice isn’t hidden, it is embraced. But true and familiar memories are called to mind. Sound brings this visual cue out of a vacuum, bringing it to reality even more with typically unnoticed elements of this experience: the hum of crickets, breathing, a song playing in the distance.

 

Stages presents a holistic memory, collaged and layered elements as they would be in life set out for the viewer to piece together their own ethereal landscape. This captivating installation exploring artificiality and the ability to reproduce memories so easily forgotten.