Brian Bishop

Biography
Brian Bishop (b. 1971 in Memphis, TN USA) is a visual artist and educator based between Birmingham, England and Belfast, Northern Ireland in the UK. In addition to an early curatorial career, he has taught on both the undergraduate and postgraduate level for nearly three decades.

Research Interests
His studio practice primarily explores the process wherein the photographic image remediated through the discursive and lyrical filter of painting exposes latent meaning. His work therefore interrogates the processes of translation between forms and how those conceptual and physical acts hold and shape meaning.

Whether through the production of image-objects or writing projects he is interested in the precarious state of the image in this post-photographic era when our world is increasingly populated by non-human generated images. His current research questions the teleological role of the image in the current rise of generative AI, and in the new digital economy Shoshana Zuboff dubbed surveillance capitalism. It also queries the material currency of the image in this time dominated by what Trevor Paglen refers to as “invisible images” a subset that includes images made by machines for an audience of other machines for the purposes of mediation, activation, operations, and enforcement. All the various manifestations of his research grapple with these questions and leverage the significant role the hand-rendered image holds in our mental and physical understanding of our world.