Cameron Bishop
x is not the same as x
2011
wood, lights, digital animation, dvd players and screens, windscreen wiper motor, motion sensors, plc technology,
7x5x2.5m
Bishop and Reis entrap the viewer in a half size room; a distorted replica of a space through which the viewer has recently passed. It is the front gallery at The West Wing, including half scale versions of Olivia Pintos-Lopez’s durational photo booth portraits. Inside this shaky interior, behind our own reflection, the viewer devolves into something else, an everyman who in the West is presented as both one and many, Santa Claus. To warp a well known phrase from Deleuze and Guattari: the white hair follicles of the long beard marks a deterritorialisation of the fur, mouth and snout of the animal. Santa, in this narrative, becomes abject. He lives behind the benign space of the shopping centre, inhabiting the unknown territories that may be the consumer’s future, and others’ present.