Lynn Criswell & Michael Bishop exhibition 2007
2007
•••Lynn Criswell••• Show and Tell
Like a trail of children walking to the front of the classroom, each performing a solo show-and-tell act, the subjects of Lynn Criswell’s wall pieces pose, gesture, offer, sign, and fade out. And just as a child’s rich and complicated experience is implausibly encased in their naïve presentation to the class, Criswell’s simply rendered protagonists manage a complicated sleight of hand. A woman’s arm, raised in a game of patty-cake with no partner in sight, signals what these works are about: they present one move, and ask the viewer to make the next. Criswell’s Adjective, a bare bones grid comprised of 18 units, features taunts and encouragements hurled from childhood. Cheap retro script, edges blackened like dirty fingernails, calls out from each panel: “Bully”, “Thin”, “Chubby” and “Sweet”. These labels float high and centered like advertising display heads, yet below them, instead of illustrations, lie cracked and wrinkled putty colored plaster fields. The viewer’s mind has little choice, in automatic reflex, but to throw its contents onto this softly defiled emptiness. In the diptych Memento, a ballerina, begins the raised heel of a toe point. Her tutu and tights are fully inhabited, their flatness rising up in a wave of humped ruffle that swings an arc across her groin. But where her costume ends, the girl has vanished, she’s gone. Purely present in Seeing Double is a grinning girl, her features etched in rich, milky lines. Her conjured daydream shows up as two conspiratorial rabbits, who press in huge and close behind her head, demi-gods whispering content we’re not privy to and surely want to guess.
Criswell works in lead, steel, and glass, handled until a dirtiness rises up. Her woods and color stains, in contrast, remain as pristine as a starched Sunday frock. The palette of greys, whites and oranges, elementary at first sight, is as rich and complicated as childhood emotions. Drawn outlines, always wavering, transform themselves from work to work: wiggling girlhood delight, the fear of the adult-watched child, and over there, the rippling aura of the magician.
Janice Porter, Director 1078 Gallery, Chico
•••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.
Like a trail of children walking to the front of the classroom, each performing a solo show-and-tell act, the subjects of Lynn Criswell’s wall pieces pose, gesture, offer, sign, and fade out. And just as a child’s rich and complicated experience is implausibly encased in their naïve presentation to the class, Criswell’s simply rendered protagonists manage a complicated sleight of hand. A woman’s arm, raised in a game of patty-cake with no partner in sight, signals what these works are about: they present one move, and ask the viewer to make the next. Criswell’s Adjective, a bare bones grid comprised of 18 units, features taunts and encouragements hurled from childhood. Cheap retro script, edges blackened like dirty fingernails, calls out from each panel: “Bully”, “Thin”, “Chubby” and “Sweet”. These labels float high and centered like advertising display heads, yet below them, instead of illustrations, lie cracked and wrinkled putty colored plaster fields. The viewer’s mind has little choice, in automatic reflex, but to throw its contents onto this softly defiled emptiness. In the diptych Memento, a ballerina, begins the raised heel of a toe point. Her tutu and tights are fully inhabited, their flatness rising up in a wave of humped ruffle that swings an arc across her groin. But where her costume ends, the girl has vanished, she’s gone. Purely present in Seeing Double is a grinning girl, her features etched in rich, milky lines. Her conjured daydream shows up as two conspiratorial rabbits, who press in huge and close behind her head, demi-gods whispering content we’re not privy to and surely want to guess.
Criswell works in lead, steel, and glass, handled until a dirtiness rises up. Her woods and color stains, in contrast, remain as pristine as a starched Sunday frock. The palette of greys, whites and oranges, elementary at first sight, is as rich and complicated as childhood emotions. Drawn outlines, always wavering, transform themselves from work to work: wiggling girlhood delight, the fear of the adult-watched child, and over there, the rippling aura of the magician.
Janice Porter, Director 1078 Gallery, Chico
•••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.
