FRANCIE BISHOP GOOD
2013-04-22Far From Apple Hill reveals far as a relative term. To experience Bishop Good’s large-scale, digital photographs is to fall between antipodes, cut through the center of the Earth on the straightest path between diametrical opposites, slip from memory to lived experience. The artist compresses place and time like folding a map, making visible an expired wind in the shape of trees or the passion in muscle memory.
You can’t go home again, cautions Thomas Wolf. Bishop Good reaches impossibly toward her distant past in Apple Hill, Pennsylvania from her present South Florida, itself a transient region shaped by pirates, political refugees, and seasonal tourists. The resulting images draw from these varied locations; familiar bodies and strangers; specific cultures and diasporas; reconstruction and autopoiesis. Bishop Good’s photographs are monuments to Walter Benjamin’s notion of memory not as “an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium.”
Bishop Good depicts the place and time of the other, who, as in folklore, is also a familiar. Bishop Good sets upon the world with a keen vision, filtering the darkness of time and place, moment and memory, sign and signifier so that the vulnerability of early childhood, the bosom of a landscape, or the trauma of a torn umbrella is yours, and you can recognize it, suddenly, as clear as a photograph. Bishop Good’s work resonates exponentially at the roots of collective memory. Far From Apple Hill is inspired and troubled by memory in hyperreality, both painfully removed and staggeringly intimate.
Exhibition runs through till May 4th, 2013
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW 2 Avenue
Miami
FL
33127
