Michael Bishop

“Michael Bishop’s new works begin by sifting through the wreckage of these historical developments. Picking up bits and pieces that might be useful, he forges these fragments into poetic wholes that have a whole lot less to do with his personal feelings than with the iblic nature of art at its best. Each of his nine most recent pieces is nothing if not a sculpture. Its physicality is undeniable. As is its density and the no-nonsense way its components rise up against gravity’s unrelenting tug. Made of iron, aluminum, and brass that has been cast, sand-blasted, and treated with volatile chemicals—as well as steel that has been rolled, cut, welded, drilled, and bolted—Bishop’s heavy-duty works have the weighty presence and industrial-strength solidity of objects built for the long haul. At the same time, there’s nothing thuggish about them. All of their constitutive parts are either scaled to the proportions of the human body (which makes them feel familiar, even comforting), or suffused with so many finely crafted details and nuanced textures that the care and devotion that went into their making is palpable. This endows them with an aura of enhanced value, a level of labor-intensive dedication we commonly reserve for things of great significance, like public memorials, shared talismans, and revered artifacts. There’s no mystery about how these qualities got there: Hard work and willpower brought them into being.”

Excerpt from Essay by David Pagel:

Michael Bishop’s mixed media sculptures are loaded with mixed meanings. Using specific materials Bishop makes a statement about society. Wood and metal are strategically utilized to form a microcosm of figures and platforms, making comment on the basic nature of the old world icons in comparison to the new. In Unbeknownst To Me Her Flagrancy’s Continued a horse is mounted on the bottom side of a wooden table, upside down, while on top an industrialized ship is suspended in air. The ship is a cold and destructive vehicle, with the fury of a woman hence the term battleaxe. Both icons have a lawless element to them: the battleaxe has an openly scandalous behavior with militant intentions and the horse is symbolic of a wild and untamed nature. All of Bishop’s pieces have this cryptic language embedded in them. Reading between the lines is essential to understanding his sculptural images in which he explores space and various icons.

Bishop has exhibited at: Michael Himovitz Gallery, Sacramento, CA; Joseph Chowning Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Art, Hacettepe University, Ankara Turkey; Redding Museum of Art, Redding, CA; Vedra Gallery, San Jose, CA; Zara Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Smith-Anderson Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; The Athenaeum, La Jolla, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Monterey, CA; Vartai Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania; The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; American Cultural Center, Brussels, Belgium; University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois; Klabal Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Joseph Chowning Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Myra Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri; Arizona Museum of Youth, Mesa, Arizona; The Embassy Gallery of West Germany, Izmir, Turkey; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA