A Working Title

About

Gallery koal is pleased to present the second Berlin solo show by artist Steve Bishop. The exhibition, A Working Title, will be on display from November 17 to December 15, 2012. The installation A Working Title by Steve Bishop places the gallery space, as a structure and a location at the centre of the exhibition. The walls of the exhibition space are not solely used as a neutral background but as an available material, cut out in sections and used to create freestanding sculptures. Embedded with flat screen monitors and wedged with DVD players, the sculptures exhibit their own balance, as well as acting as positive counterparts to the voids in the walls. Playing a selection of videos demonstrating the slow motion cutting of metal, the pieces refer - like an inscription - to the act of cutting that preceded their making. The removal of the plasterboard sections opens the closed surfaces of the gallery's white cube, now making visible the storage space behind the nearly hermetic room within a room. Bishop has left a mobile phone within the gallery space that is set to play the beginning chords of a well-known song when called. The phone acts a conduit through which the artist's contact with the show can be continuously exercised from afar. The show is accompanied by large metal-framed compositions hanging on the walls. Their proportions are based upon the standardized A paper format and are an example of Bishop's employment of predefined ratios within his artistic practice. These frames use their method of suspension as an integral aesthetic. The normally hidden hanging wires are played off each other striking a balance in the whole. As with the wall cut-outs and the sculptures that come out of them, the line between material and installation, exhibition architecture and exhibit is blurred again. Steve Bishop (*1983) studied at the Royal College of Art in London and spent the recent summer as artist in residence at Artists Unlimited in Bielefeld.