| The principle interest of my studio practice is the exploration of the fine line between the forgotten or overlooked moment and the fetishized memory as simultaneously seen through the filters of portraiture in the West, snapshot photography and the contemporary cultural phenomenon of constant surveillance. Inevitably, it also addresses memory, as it is known through photography, and questions if these moments represent truth or fiction.
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In-Between Moments – Brian Bishop
The principle interest of my studio practice is the exploration of the fine line between the forgotten or overlooked moment and the fetishized memory as simultaneously seen through the filters of portraiture in the West, snapshot photography and the contemporary cultural phenomenon of constant surveillance. Inevitably, it also addresses memory, as it is known through photography, and questions if these moments represent truth or fiction.
Through this work, I mine the landscape of the common, the mundane, the banal and the fragmented as they are presented in the context of notation, documentation and memory. The work navigates the intersection of the overabundant, surveilled image and the poignancy of the intimate vignette or home movie. Implied narratives and contexts are generated on the margins, between the images and outside the frame. The resulting images appear disjunctive and out-of-context, alluding to the “lost” images on a roll of film, the in-between moments and the “throwaway” image—the mistake.
My work is in part an attempt to pinpoint a locus between the intangible and the material, the intellectual and the tactile. To paraphrase Jonathon Lasker: painting is a vital medium due to its dialectical capacity to engage a mediated image or illusion and to present it in an actualized experience. It is able to achieve such a synthesis because, in viewing the painting, the audience is confronted with the material and artifice of the construction of the object—they unavoidably have to reckon with the indexical quality of the image while reconciling it. In this manner, I am not presenting a mere (re)presentation of the moment but, by making it into a painting, a physical object, I render the fleeting moment concrete.
