Exhibition by John Pilson
May 28 — Jul 2, 2005
Description:
This was a solo exhibition of video works by John Pilson.Pilson depicted 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. The skyscraper is the architectural epitome of the modernist grid, based upon standards of engineering, scientific progress, and urban planning that privilege the social and aesthetic order found in the pure geometry of the machine world. Pilson recorded irrational vignettes that played out against this rationalist and homogenous architectural grid. In the videos, workers wander through offices, taking part in alternately comical, ridiculous, and random actions that undermine the clinical and corporate atmosphere.
In Mr. Pickup (2001), a lawyer is observed in his office as he spends half an hour trying (but failing) to put documents in a briefcase to leave for an important meeting. Here, bureaucratic decorum is held up against a comedy of errors of vaudevillian proportions.
Pilson’s single-channel work St. Denis (2003) is inspired by the history of an infamous turn-of-the-century New York building of the same name. Once host to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant as a hotel, the building was also where Alexander Graham Bell first publicly demonstrated the telephone, and where Marcel Duchamp maintained a secret studio and where his last work Étant donnés (1966) was found. Lee Harvey Oswald also briefly worked in the building. St. Denis also reflected upon the building's present use as converted office space occupied almost entirely by psychoanalysts and massage therapists.
Dark Empire, which was filmed in real-time from dusk to nightfall during the August 2003 blackout, featured a profile of the Empire State Building gradually darkening as the sun set on a city without electricity. Forming a black spire against a sprawling metropolis, Dark Empire is 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.
An exhibition opening took place on May 27 and an artist talk with Pilson followed on May 28.
Curated by Jonathan Middleton.
Related People
Back to:
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.