Steve Bishop

Steve Bishop works with fabricated and found materials and objects to articulate the poignancy and humour in sentimentality. His installations, such as little statues, a bowl of milk and cereal, an unmade bed, a half-eaten cake, or a screenshot of a Facebook chat, point to both the importance and futility of time and of a human life. Experiencing his installations produces an eerie feeling of entering into domestic settings but finding their inhabitants missing. Bishop’s video works feature touching amateur and found footage, like karaoke performances and cover songs. His works, to put it in the artist’s words, are “containers for something”, that “something” being evermore personal. Thus, the artist’s objectively everyday representations carry a subjective substance of serenity of human existence and cosiness of a regular life. ...

Founded in 2011, Carlos/Ishikawa’s program is dedicated to considered and ambitious exhibitions that offer diverse artists’ perspectives on structural, socio-cultural, and political questions. The program focuses on international artists with often wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary and experimental practices. There is an interest within the program of challenging the aesthetic conventions of conceptual art, and a focus on art that is able to operate on an affective, emotional level as well as a rigorous intellectual one. The gallery has offered many artists their first solo show, many of whom have gone on to receive recognition internationally. ...