James Sterling Pitt

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 re-productions 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 water color 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.