Steve Bishop at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present Start Over Every Morning, a solo exhibition of work by Toronto-born, UK-based artist Steve Bishop. This is the first exhibition of Bishop’s work in Canada.

In his artistic practice Steve Bishop explores how mental states can be materialized and conveyed in space, through installations often involving personal belongings and mementos. “If you can have a genuine empathetic or sentimental reaction to an object, then it can transcend that plastic quality of kitsch. I look for that duality,” says Bishop. By subtly distorting familiar, often intimate domestic scenarios, he creates intermediate worlds in which concepts of time are suspended, and clear boundaries between private and public space, exhibition and non-exhibition are blurred.

The work Something to Remember You By takes up the majority of the gallery. Running lengthwise from one wall to the opposite are the repeating forms of a generic white kitchen unit. The kitchen consists only of upper cabinets and a lower counter, and appears as though it could, and would, extend endlessly, were it not for the walls containing it. On the counter sits a cake, already sliced into neat squares, a third of which are missing. The pastel-coloured icing on its surface spells out “Happy New Year” (to be exact, we can only see “Happy New Yea,” the “r” has presumably been sliced away). Two plastic Tupperware containers sit next to the cake, holding some of those missing slices. A small FM radio also rests on the counter, quietly filling the space with jazz music. The only light in the room emanates from under the cabinets, dimly illuminating a strip of linoleum just in front. Beyond that lies a plush carpet, evoking the feeling of padding downstairs to the kitchen in the middle of the night.

Upon closer inspection, one might notice that the cake is actually made of plastic. Its “Happy New Year” message is rendered nearly permanent, immortalizing a fleeting celebration. “There is a limit to how we understand our place in time. We remember what happened yesterday and plan for tomorrow,” writes Bishop. In relation to the uniform and seemingly infinite row of kitchen cabinets, the cake functions as a break or mark, just as rituals such as birthdays or new years function as marks, helping to orient us within the differentiated and disorganized mass of time that stretches before and beyond us.

The work titled Far And Near At Once, consists of four text-based pages and one found photograph. The pages are from Re-Evaluation Counselling, an organization that Bishop became aware of after finding one of their pamphlets inserted into a second-hand book. Founded in the mid-1950s, Re-Evaluation Counselling was based on the ideologies and methods of Scientology, with a focus on the emotional catharsis of its followers. A page with the heading “My Goals” features a grid with a Y-axis describing subjects ranging in scale from “For Me” and “For My Family” to “For The Universe.” Similarly, demarcations of time on the X-axis, range from “Next Week” to “For Always.” The way to find oneself in relation to all things in eternity, this grid seems to say, is to approach the expanse square by square.

The photograph shows a paved backyard and garden beyond, with a set of white outdoor patio furniture under dappled shade, taken through a window from inside a house. There are no signs of a human figure, but the flash bouncing off the glass of the window pane reminds us that someone was there, taking the photo, and freezing that moment in time.

Steve Bishop (born 1983 in Toronto, CA) lives in London. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2024); Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2022, 2015, 2013); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2021); Galeria Jacqueline Martins, São Paulo (2020); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2019); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018); and Supportico Lopez with 6817, Los Angeles (2016).