JAMES STERLING PITT | On A Clear Day We Were Lightning
November 3 - December 8, 2012
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present On a Clear Day We Were Lightning, new work by artist James Sterling Pitt. Conceived to exist as an object-based journal, the artist’s current body of works stand as two and three-dimensional interpretations of fleeting sights and experiences. Pitt aims to make the ephemeral concrete with modestly sized, relational sculpture and drawings. The artist’s hand-made reproductions allow recollection to uniquely manifest as tangible markers of a time and place. Often coming into being as a series of on-site field sketches, the personified images of sensory events gradually evolve from graphite and watercolor on paper to elaborately constructed wooden models.
The titles of the artist’s sculptures pay homage to the variety of encounters and perceptual shifts that occur within a calendared length of time --- each individual work orchestrated as one line to a larger score. In congruence with this tradition, the title of the exhibition references the literal and conceptual “lightning flashes” that occur in neural activity and the formation of memory. In the fashion of a summer monsoon unexpectedly overwhelming a clear afternoon, the work of James Sterling Pitt re-presents the romantic mental snapshots of a days activities with fervently abstracted proxies.
James Sterling Pitt
Artforum
February 13, 2013
by Gwen Allen
In her 2011 book Under Blue Cup, Rosalind Krauss understands artistic medium as “a form of remembering”-- a metaphor made poignant by the loss and recuperation of self she experienced following a brain aneurysm (a disruption the book both describes and, in its fragment, aphoristic form, mirrors). Like Krauss, artist James Sterling Pitt also underwent intensive physical and cognitive rehabilitation after a brain injury and, in the wake of this sudden change in state, he too allowed the disorientation to inform his work, specifically by adapting his art to function as a mnemonic system.
“On a Clear Day We Were Lightning.” Pitt’s second solo exhibition at Eli Ridgway Gallery, comprised some twenty painted plywood sculptures, each bearing a different abstract form that the artist had derived from a visual diary he uses to mark time and document events. However, this “object-based journal” chronicles less the physical appearance of the world the artist encounters than those very cognitive processes by which he apprehends it, thereby depicting that intangible threshold between outer and inner reality in which consciousness resides.
Insistently planar, the resultant freestanding sculptures resemble shadow boxes: Multiple plywood layers have been cut out and sandwiched together to create a shallow, framed space, within which spare, schematic patterns of line, shape, and color are silhouetted. Some works are strung with metallic painted nylon or wires suspending small disks, as though the works were orreries or abacuses. The motifs employed-- grids, cells, webs, lattices, ladders-- call to mind any number of scientific diagrams that map geological or biological structures. Yet if such models generalize and abstract the world, Pitt’s sculptures are unequivocally concrete and specific. Functioning as windows, they offer glimpses of the artists observations and memories, many of which allude to the New Mexico landscape so familiar to him. Occasionally, it is possible to guess the literal referents in his work: to imagine, for example, fluttering blossoms in the pale greenish-beige circles of Untitled (For the Tree in the Breeze 8-16-12), or turquoise water aglow with suspended mineral content in Untitled (The Color of the Lake Before the Storm/ The Color of the Lake During the Storm) (all works 2012).
Yet to read these objects as mere illustrations is to miss the point. Pitt seeks to portray the world not as it appears at any given moment in time, but as it feels. This wasn’t always the case, however. Returning to his studio after his accident, the artist began working again by making (out of wood, acrylic, paper and glue) faithful replicas of his favorite book and album covers. These shells conveyed the surface of the world” silent, still, and devoid of interaction. In many ways, the works in this show presented the flip side, suggesting a realm of temporality and possibility. Here, even the voids were active-- not empty, but liminal spaces waiting to be filled. (Perhaps with music: One Saturday evening, experimental composer Duane Pitre infused the gallery with sonorous vibration, breathing presence and movement into the show).
While Pitt’s art is informed by trauma and recovery, to read it exclusively through this lens proves limiting, as was made clear by a panel of neuroscientists and doctors who, convening for this exhibition, characterized Pitt’s practice as a form or art therapy and, more bizarrely, his work as a literal depiction of the brain (a CAT scan was circled as “proof”). However, Pitt’s work is best understood not as a by-product of healing but as the very medium through which the self is re-formed. For Krauss, artistic medium has less to do with the material support of a genre (painting, photography, sculpture) than with the way these genres constitute a set of representational conventions within the collective memory of their practitioners. Historically, one of the roles of such conventions has been what the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky termed ostranenie-- a making strange that disrupts our automatic habits or perception in order to re-enchant the world and renew our engagement with it. In a sense, Pitt’s art not only estranges but is predicated on an estrangement of perception and memory. And through these simultaneously operative channels, one can only marvel at the infinite complexity of such seemingly elemental work.
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201302/james-sterling-pitt-38686
In among the Pitts
San Francisco Chronicle
November 17, 2012
by Kenneth Baker
It takes a moment to recognize, and longer to accept, the rare quality that sets apart the work of Bay Area artist James Sterling Pitt: freedom from irony.
We like to believe that at some level, contemporary art registers the experience of its maker. Pitt's painted wood sculpture at Ridgway rewards this will to believe intuitively even before a viewer learns the circumstances behind it.
Pitt survived a terrible car accident several years ago, and a brain injury that he incurred repatterned the terms in which he experiences the world. His ostensibly abstract sculptures serve for him as a way of phrasing and stabilizing recollected sensations that he can no longer voice in other terms, even inwardly.
The soft-cornered perimeters of works such as "Untitled (Sky/Sage)" (2012) and "Untitled (Goodnight Song for Waves)" (2012), reminiscent of commercial aircraft windows, evoke his compromised peripheral vision. They also claim for his work an implicit ancestry in the surrealist work of artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Barbara Hepworth, and the free-ranging inventions of Richard Tuttle.
But nothing in modernist art history has Pitts' quiet but urgent air of private notation.
The lightness and occasional exuberance of Pitts' work takes nothing away from its seriousness. It strikes a note of luckiness to be alive seldom heard so clearly in the art of our time.