John Pilson

Western Front Exhibitions is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York artist John Pilson.

John Pilson depicts a world in which its participants are alternately at odds and fascinated by the cold and impersonal corporate work environments found in the Manhattan skyscrapers of his native New York. As the architectural epitome of the modernist grid, the skyscraper is based upon the standards of engineering and scientific progress while its resulting urban planning privileges the social and aesthetic order found in the ‘pure geometry’ of the machine world.

In his cooly enigmatic videos, Pilson records irrational vignettes that play out against this rational and homogenous grid architecture. Workers are often found wandering the halls and offices of skyscrapers, taking part in alternately comical, ridiculous, and random actions that undermine the clinical and uniform business atmosphere of which they find themselves in.

In Mr. Pickup (2001), a camera observes a lawyer in his office as he spends half an hour trying (but failing) to put documents in a briefcase so he can leave for an important meeting. Here, corporate standards of success and composure are held up against a comedy of errors of vaudevillian proportions.

Pilson’s single channel work St. Denis (2003) is inspired by past and present events at an infamous turn-of-the-century New York building of the same name. Once host to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant in its former role as a hotel, the building was also the site of Alexander Graham Bell’s first public demonstration of the telephone, and where Marcel Duchamp maintained a secret studio and where his last work Etant Donee was found. Lee Harvey Oswald also briefly worked in the building. St. Denis reflects upon the buildings history history as well as its present use as a converted office space now occupied almost entirely by psychoanalysts and massage therapists.

Another work in the exhibition, Dark Empire, which was filmed in real time from dusk to darkness during the August 2003 blackout in New York City, features a profile of the Empire State Building gradually darkening as the sun drops in the horizon behind a city without electricity. Forming a black spire against a sprawling metropolis made powerless, Dark Empire becomes a meditation on modernist urban planning where an enduring icon of progress and corporate ascendancy disappears into the inky blackness of the city grid from which it rose.

Pilson received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He was a recipient of one of the “Prizes for a Young Artist” for his participation in the 2001 Venice Biennial and recent exhibitions include ‘Continuity and Change in Art from 1880 to Present’ at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, ‘The Moderns’ at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, 'The Americans' at The Barbican Centre in London, and ‘Moving Pictures’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

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John Pilson