Double-edged vision to Bishop's mixed media
Sunday, June 11, 2000, Sacramento Bee
By Victoria Dalkey
Michael Bishop's mixed media sculptures at the Michael Himovitz Gallery are elegant in the way that math problems can be elegant: They are precise, perfectly poised equations that bring together opposing elements: darkness and light, heaviness and weightlessness, humor and seriousness.
In a statement accompanying the exhibition, Bishop writes that his work hovers "between pessimistic and optimistic visions; between the futility of human existence and a constant need for some sense of meaning and salvation."
In "Time and Place, Peace and Quiet," he addresses our relationship with elders. The installation is composed of a chair: a low table set with a stack of metal plates: a tall, octagonal structure with a chute that suggests a grain elevator: and a series of 28 casts of the head of a laughing man. Bishop thinks of the piece as a place for sitting and talking and listening to elders - a wonderful and precious thing, yet something we don't always do.
The storage unite, Bishop said during a phone interview from his studio in Chico, is like a think tank - a place where something more poetic than grain is stored. The chair invites you to sit and contemplate what's inside the silo and its relationship to the other elements of the installation.
There is a double edge to the metal plates, which suggest both the collection plates passed around in churches and the kind of dinner plates used by prisoners. The laughing faces also have a double edge. On one hand, Bishop noted, they are pleasing and have a carnival quality. But hovering between a grin and a grimace, they suggest a kind of hysteria. Rather than offering solutions, the polarity of the elements asks viewers to contemplate who and what we are.
An ominous surrealism pervades "Unbeknownst to Me Her Flagrancy's Continued," an assemblage composed of a model of a passenger ship suspended over a table with an upside-down horse on its underside. The floating ship and the leaden horse are both means of conveyance, yet, like ships passing in the night, each follows its own path, unaware of the other. Here, the elements seem to suggest frustration, an inability to make contact or establish a connection.
"Indiscriminate Oversight" is a seemingly playful piece with a dark side. In it, the horn of a Victrola is suspended over a chair that invites the viewer to sit and listen to silent sounds. In front of the chair is a long table on which small rabbits perch at one end. Their shadow selves are attached upside-down under them, turning the table into a kind of landscape. The upside-down bunnies, which are cute but somehow menacing, like Disney creatures gone mad, ask us to look below the surface at the underside of experience.
"Heavy Hand" takes the form of a bridgelike table set with aluminum casts of well-used boxing gloves. They address the subject of manliness and the process of boys being numbed in psychological and social ways as they grow up, says Bishop.
"Public and Private," the most moving piece in the show, is a collaboration between Bishop and Nikki Davis, his 13-year-old second cousin who has Down syndrome. It takes the form of a glassed-in repository filled with Davis' drawings under a table set with oddly beautiful, machinelike vessels, which could be stand-ins for figures, are notched, symbolically suggesting, perhaps people whom we see as different or damaged in some way. Inside the container below, Davis' drawings are preserved as the precious objects they are.