Opening: Michael Bisbee: Once There but Here Today for You

Opening: Saturday, December 9, 2023
On view through Saturday, January 6, 2024

Michael Bisbee moved to Magdalena, New Mexico some years ago, giving up the standard urban studio setting of New York where he had previously established himself. In response to his new environment, he sought to consider the high desert surroundings as a studio without walls.

Not wanting to modify the land or capture natural “trophies” he set about making objects that were suitable for an undisruptive collaboration to be photographically documented and subsequently presented in a gallery setting, both object and documentation in dialogue with each other.

In his Magdalena show at kind of a small array, Bisbee presents a variety of such collaborations — a wooden house shape photographed against the backdrop of Kelly Mine; a series of hand-made wooden units presented in a large specimen jar before a window scavenged from a remodel of the Magdalena Library; and a length of rope knotted with an ancient form of measurement and cast randomly as a linear element within the two-hundred-fifty-seven-foot circumference of a VLA radio telescope dish, with the result photographed and presented as a kind of contemplation on distance and evaluation.