August 28-October 9
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
Artist Talk: Friday, August 28, 3:30-5pm
Opening Reception: Friday, August 28, 5-7pm
Ruffin Gallery at the UVA Department of Art presents Lemniscata, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Sasha Fishman.
“In me everything is already flowing…” – Luce Irigaray
The movement of water is determined by the body that contains it. From transportation, drainage, and energy-generating systems of pipes, dams, and catchments to the porous aqua-ecological boundaries established by beaches, coastlines, and riverbeds, water circulates perpetually through the infrastructures of our manmade and natural environments. We do not always see where the water goes, but we know these cycles of absorption and release: the trickling, the flooding, the rippling, the pour, the churn, the drip, the gush. Sasha Fishman’s My Lungs (2026) embodies these hydro-logics of circulation.
Image: Courtesy of Mariana Mora, Text: Eleonor Botoman
One’s first encounter with the sculpture is not its sight—an oviform droplet of haint blue blooming from the gallery floor—but its sound. A pulsating symphony of water floods the space with fluid frictions of polyphonic resonance. The ceramic fountain generates these rhythmic frequencies through a biodynamic construction of perpetual cycling. Water pumps up into six lobed flowform basins, clinging to the side of the fountain with a creaturely organicism, before cascading into the fountain’s petaloid core. A closer look into these smaller flowforms reveals a unique reconfiguration of water's circularity: small vortices lapping back into themselves, producing oroborous-like figures of eight spilling into a choreographed dance of aquatic infinity. Stay with the sculpture’s sensorium for a moment longer and the water’s pulsations begin to mirror fluctuations of breath.
My Lungs represents an important evolution in the artist’s eco-sculptural practice. Building on her previous work in fountain-building and biomaterials, this piece reflects Fishman’s continued fascination with aquatic systems of energy exchange. Her hydrological sculptures take up questions around toxicity, entropy, care, capture, and fluidity. This curiosity has led Fishman to experiment with living substrates such as fish skin, hagfish slime, and mycelium as well as kinetic structures derived from marine aquaculture such as salmon ladders and fish cannons, tracing humanity’s past and present obsession with controlling, transporting, and harnessing water from the ecosystemic down to the bodily scale. Sasha Fishman is not searching for an answer, but drawn to the murkiness —the tension, confusion, and complexity of where these phenomena arise and how technology attempts to resolve deeply rooted ecological and ethical issues.
Sasha Fishman is a New York-based sculptor and researcher. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. She is a current fellow at Lighthouseworks and recipient of the 2026 Folly Tree Dancing Tree Award.
This exhibition is supported by the UVA Department of Art and the Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin Foundation Endowment for Distinguished Artists-in-Residence