John Pilson

Predominantly working with video and black and white photographs Pilson’s work explores corporate America, in particular the alienation of office workers depicted in moments of leisure when authority and order are suspended, the irrational, chaotic emotionality of the people caught in modern culture.

The earlier videos Interregna and Above the Grid (both 2000) were filmed in an office where the artist was working at the time. Interregna combines shots of himself with images of co-workers jumping over cubicles or singing a Puccini opera. Uninterested in story-telling, Pilson portrays these people objectively to reveal their individual expression. The frequent use of an abstract palette of greys in his photographs recall film noir in that places are far from comfortable and homelike. In his video Dark Empire (2003) the artist shot the Empire State Building during a blackout in August: unavoidably reminiscent of Warhol’s 1964 Empire film, this motionless and overbearing monolith of the modern age becomes consumed by eroding darkness. But dark motifs appear also in works that recall an experience of time registered in traces of the past, as in his video St Denis (2003). Set in a hotel built in the 1860s which boasted an eclectic mix of guests including Abraham Lincoln and Marcel Duchamp (where his last work, Etant Données, was discovered in a secret studio after his death), the video shows aspects of the psychology that underscores the building’s daily life. His most recent multi-channel videos investigate group codes and social interaction, for instance through sports fanatics sharing endless conference calls, whereas his last photo series Coliseum (2006) looks at the blurring of domestic and work spaces: museum-period rooms, advertising agencies that resemble empty playrooms for children and conference rooms.

Pilson (b. 1968, New York) lives and works in New York. This year, Pilson will participate in the following group shows: Working Men, Analix Forever, Geneva, Switzerland; Idiot Joy Showland, Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio, USA; Prospect 1 (curated by Dan Cameron), New Orleans, USA. In 2007 he had solo exhibitions at Praz-Dalavallade (Paris) and the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati) and was included in Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Automatic Update, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; The Office, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA. Previous solo exhibitions include Artpace (San Antonio, 2005); and P.S. 1/MoMA (NY, 2000). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the US and internationally such as Time Frame, P.S.1/MoMA (NY, 2006) and Nothing But Pleasure, Bawag Foundation (Vienna, 2006); The Moderns, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli, 2003); Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY, 2002); Bureaucracy, Foksal Gallery Foundation (Warsaw, 2001); The Americans – New Art, Barbican Gallery (London, 2001); the 2001 Venice Biennale; Moma2000: Open Ends, The Museum of Modern Art; Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (both NY, 2000).

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