We Took A Family Portrait

Artist: Job Piston
Gallery: Silverman Gallery
Exhibition Dates: December 17 – January 29th, 2011
Opening reception: December 18th, 5 -7 pm


"C-prints and a text installation based on his recent trip to Taiwan. These disparate elements unfold as a lyrical meditation on autobiography, familial roots, and nationhood, beginning with a series of landscapes of his grandfather’s garden. These stark photographs juxtapose familial roots against the rapidly shifting Taiwanese urban sprawl, while also invoking the legacy of the New Topographics, which Piston subverts with his own affective history. Against these, Piston presents a series of photograms, created by exposing photo paper directly onto the computer screen. This innovative but imprecise process yields images that are ephemeral and poetic, based on cell phone snap shops of the urbanscape. These works play with the notion of the index, both in the process and in their site specificity, while also creating a delicate archive of globalization. This is echoed in the text piece, a found word poem of signs and phrases that combined offer an insightful cross section of a culture in flux."
press release via silverman gallery