John Pilson
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
Through October 7
An empty trading floor, full of computers but devoid of any human presence, is ghostly quiet except for the green glow of a stock ticker marching along like a financial EKG. A faceless man clad in black is pelted with tennis balls by office workers.
These images from John Pilson's scattered multi-channel video installation, A la Claire Fontaine (2001) elicit a rapid darting of the eyes as the mind tries to fix meaning through the activity of the glance. Edward S. Casey writes "the glance is able to take in entities of the most varied scale...It is the paradoxical power of the glance to find its way into the profound as well as the superficial."
Pilson's installation is composed of glancing images that treat the apparently superficial as a potential location for the profound. His chain of scenes, and his still photographs of objects and cityscapes, all address the corporate worksphere. Due to the tragic events that shook New York on September 11th, we have all been shown the face, indeed the thousands of faces, which constitute multinational capitalism. No longer a blank symbol, the skyscraper has overnight become a profound locus of urban unity. With this in mind, Pilson's most haunting video image depicts a young girl singing absent-mindedly as she plays alone in a quiet high-rise office.
As she exhales condensation onto a window high above Manhattan, the girl makes finger drawings of a sun, a spiral, a heart. Her crude marks, the familiar icons of girlhood art-making, begin to fade with her patch of breath even before they are completed.
The ephemeral drawings seem at odds with the solid, regimented cubicles and corridors of corporate life, yet they remind us of the whisper-like evanescence and underlying instability of our grown-up structures and ways of life. Investing his images with the latent tension and humanity of the workplace, Pilson alternates between banal office settings and performative scenes of imaginative absurdity.
We begin to sense that in his business locales, anything could happen—work or play, the humdrum or the unexpected, the trivial or the fathomless—and that these dichotomies may be two sides of the same coin.
Lisa Jaye Young
