Clearness will soon be a medical currency; a sign of a once used organ submerged in soap: empty and awaiting instructions.

Decellularization and optical clearing processes strip a living material: scrubbing genetic data, color, and personal residue. Offering a blank slate, the same scaffolding as before to a host of new genes. A shadow of a past exterior, used, erased, and repurposed? 

Do you think about this too? I think the plastics knew all along.

Was this what held us before we grew? A false disguise in water? Purell swelling and melting in your palm, where do these microbe carcasses go? A slippery and confusing gurgle; soft and viscous; a state of in between, wiped of identity. Or the tunakit in my aquarium. 

An invisible film, clearness is a state before what we know to be; of what would be leftover if our bodies were boiled down to protein; no color; collagen; chicken fat; the bridge between your nostrils; a connective tissue stripped of its cells; gelatin that coagulates on refrigerated fish: reminders of the biological membranes under our skin, a texture that makes Westerners uneasy but one we should acquaint ourselves with.

Sasha Fishman

Sasha Fishman is a sculptor and researcher working with marine biomaterials in Los Angeles. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin (2018). Sasha has been a recipient of numerous awards, including a grant from The Dallas Museum of Art (2018), research fellowships from The University of Texas at Austin (2018), and scholarships from The Baltimore Jewelry Center, Urban Glass, Oxbow and Anderson Ranch. She is an organizer at SUPERCOLLIDER, a Materials Researcher at Spira, and is finishing up a fellowship at Caltech where she has developed biomaterials and accessible material characterization methods for the arts community.

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