22/5/2008
Steve Bishop
Supplement, London
Simply Read. The works in the exhibition were made in response to Bishop's travels in North America. The show elaborates upon the idea of virtuality, with the familiar re-visited in video, print and sculpture.
Twin Exposures
By Steve Bishop
I've always had a thing for Alaska. It has become my archetypal image of some sort of distant snug simple life: my 'Walden Pond'. The images transmitted through my television are largely responsible for informing this idealised fantasy land. As I child I was an avid watcher of the NBC show Northern Exposure . For those who don't know, here's a brief synopsis: Joel Fleischman, a neurotic New Yorker is forced to take a position as the sole doctor in the remote town of Cicely, Alaska for a certain amount of time (6 series it seemed) as a way to pay off his medical training. The roads were always snowy, everyone is always shuffling into the Brick saloon from the cold and the moose always have pedestrian rights - freely walking through deserted high streets. Beaming straight from Alaska into my living room in England, 4500 miles away, the images made their way into my psyche and sometimes into my art.
So after years of longing to visit Northern Exposure's Alaska, the opportunity arose. Upon investigation however, it turned out that the show was actually filmed in a town called Roslyn in Washington State (pop. 1,017), 2 hours outside of Seattle. The Alaska I had known and dreamt of had actually not been Alaska at all. This severe blow to the truth that television had taught me about the world, didn't put me off, and still in search an experience of realisation (of what - I don't know) I set off in August 2007.
I flew into Seattle, rented a car, and on my way to Roslyn stopped to visit the filming locations of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. 'Twin Peaks', like Cicely, is a fictional name for a town (actually filmed in two small towns and parts of northern California) and the 15 years, which had passed since filming, had taken its toll on the badly preserved iconic town. Many of the locations had changed quite significantly. The towns' people and many businesses seemed to have washed their hands of any association to the Lynchian dream. Sadly there wasn't the uncanny feeling of entering a world of fiction that I was after.
Northern Exposure's Roslyn was a different experience altogether. All of the outdoor locations for the show were shot on, or just off, its main high street. The Brick Saloon, Ruth Anne's general store, the radio station and Joel Fleischman's doctor's office were within spitting distance of each other. With the exception of the doctor's office (now a gift shop dedicated to selling all things related to the show), all the exteriors of the buildings had been preserved, as they had been when the show finished.
Okay, so I wasn't even near Alaska, but I was in Roslyn, which is geographically the exact same place as 'Cicely'. So had TV let me down? With the only difference being the peculiar unexplained absence of Dr. Fleishman, Maggie and the rest of the characters (and the transformed gift shop - but I'll ignore that), I wondered, had I actually entered into the show?
The more time I spent there, the more I didn't quite know where I was. My eyes had seemingly become the camera crew and my brain, the production team. I was exploring a parallel non-space where the reality produced from the town's inclusion in the show, hadn't merged well with the effects of time. The townspeople were going about their daily business but the continuity of the show still remained. Where did Cicely end and Roslyn begin?
With the façade of TV's screen, cracked but not blown apart, I struggled to capture whatever reality was left before it disappeared more. Armed with an episode of Northern on my iPod for reference, I scouted every road in the small town at 5am, re-filming each pre-dawn dewy shot from the openi ng credits of the show. This resulted in the piece, Twin Exposure, a split screen 42-second video of the original credits running alongside with my super-8mm simulation.
It was my intention that the use of the two parallel images, of which arguably both have an equal claim to the 'real', would combine to reveal a greater understanding of the magical place I stared at as a child. I set out to directly experience something of which I had only had an indirect experience of previously. My resulting footage is no more an indication of the truth I was searching for, than that of the original. Maybe, by traveling to Roslyn, I did go to Alaska after all.
Private View 23 May 6 - 9pm.
Supplement
31 Temple street - London
Free admission