Parent Company is pleased to announce Implements for Deviation, a solo exhibition by Dena Paige Fischer. The exhibition presents Fischer's exploration of sculptural objects as functional instruments. Working with industrial materials and the visual language of utility, Fischer constructs tools that simultaneously compel use and resist it—objects that look purposeful but behave unexpectedly.

The sculptures are built from materials sourced from hardware stores and industrial supply shops: wood, metal, resin, epoxy, sometimes incorporating collected and altered found objects. Each piece bears the physical markers of functionality, brush bristles, handles, and grips, yet their intended use remains ambiguous. In this way, the artist doesn’t use instruments to make art, but rather, Fischer opts to make the instruments art, constructing objects that occupy the space between sculpture and implement, between aesthetic object and functional device.

Several works are what the artist calls "mark makers," objects engineered to draw, paint, or scratch. Yet unlike traditional tools designed to abbreviate space, time, and effort between user and task, Fischer's instruments are conceived to create distance, to hinder precision, and to resist efficiency. This forced imprecision is central to Fischer's practice. By making the creative process more difficult, these tools generate a looseness, depth, and a quality of mark-making that proves elusive through conventional means. The struggle is recorded and becomes generative.

While the works are largely rooted in the visual language of practicality (each piece looks like a tool meant to solve a problem), they often tend to tip into absurdity, both in practice and appearance. Their unfamiliar functionality confuses expectation, and Fischer leans into this, infusing each object with a dry humor that undercuts its utilitarian disguise.

In Implements for Deviation, Fischer offers objects that deviate not only from their expected function but from the very logic of tool-making itself. What emerges is a body of work that questions our assumptions about utility and its true value.