Michel Bishop exhibition 2007
2007
•••Michael Bishop•••
After the Factory / After the Lesson
Paintings and sculptures belong to principally different references to reality. A painting is like a window which leads our gaze out from the confines of our imagination. It can open up worlds for us – and memories. On the other hand, sculpture is very real. It offers a reality which surrounds us, actually and immediately. Sculptures are a tangible counterpart. Michael Bishop works with his reality, and redefines by using materials such as bronze, Styrofoam, wood. The head molds used in his totems are highly conventional, extremely trivial clichés, but also images that stimulate questions of existence, reality and appearance, duration and loss. They include motifs relevant to various aspects of cultural history, such as detective stories, cyber-science fiction, faded antiquity and everyday modern culture. What they have in common is their very specific relationship with reality and transience, their particular form of existence. A classic example is given as the “Unknown woman from the Seine” whose enigmatic existence and presence, which could only be perceived in the form of a death mask, inspired writers and musicians leading them to create a unique world for this mysterious beauty in novels and pieces of music, not knowing that the death mask was a falsification, itself a work of art. The extent to which Michael Bishop intends to present a consideration of such complex aspects of reality is uncertain, but of course he, as an artist, is consciously the constructor of real objects.
This is Michael Bishop first solo exhibition with LIMN Gallery. Bishop lives and works in Chico, CA
From the essay “Art and Industry” by Ullrich Hellmann.
After the Factory / After the Lesson
Paintings and sculptures belong to principally different references to reality. A painting is like a window which leads our gaze out from the confines of our imagination. It can open up worlds for us – and memories. On the other hand, sculpture is very real. It offers a reality which surrounds us, actually and immediately. Sculptures are a tangible counterpart. Michael Bishop works with his reality, and redefines by using materials such as bronze, Styrofoam, wood. The head molds used in his totems are highly conventional, extremely trivial clichés, but also images that stimulate questions of existence, reality and appearance, duration and loss. They include motifs relevant to various aspects of cultural history, such as detective stories, cyber-science fiction, faded antiquity and everyday modern culture. What they have in common is their very specific relationship with reality and transience, their particular form of existence. A classic example is given as the “Unknown woman from the Seine” whose enigmatic existence and presence, which could only be perceived in the form of a death mask, inspired writers and musicians leading them to create a unique world for this mysterious beauty in novels and pieces of music, not knowing that the death mask was a falsification, itself a work of art. The extent to which Michael Bishop intends to present a consideration of such complex aspects of reality is uncertain, but of course he, as an artist, is consciously the constructor of real objects.
This is Michael Bishop first solo exhibition with LIMN Gallery. Bishop lives and works in Chico, CA
From the essay “Art and Industry” by Ullrich Hellmann.
