James Sterling Pitt: Decoder (Lost Sculpture and a Few Ideas)

April 13 - May 18,2024

From Seven Sisters:

"Seven Sisters celebrates the opening of James Sterling Pitt: Decoder (Lost Sculpture and a Few Ideas) with a reception on Saturday, April 13, 2024, from 2 to 4 PM and an artist walkthrough at 4 PM.

The title Decoder alludes to the works in the exhibition as a form of communication: drawings and sculptures that can transmit meaning. They unscramble signals and words into abstract shapes that cue a specific memory, time, or place and back again. The subtitle Lost Sculpture... interjects a sense of humor as these works have been stowed away for 15 years ...and a Few Ideas, understating the plentitudes they contained for the maker, then and now.

The exhibition includes the artist’s first drawings made after sustaining a traumatic brain injury. While recovering from initial orthopedic surgery and adapting to neuropsychiatric effects and vision changes, James completed his first two larger-scale drawings with pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. As this visual shorthand blurs functional and artistic lines, they morph into James’ spells and recipes for the first sculptures, where temperature, place, landscape memory, and chains of thoughts become material. In these formational constructions, you feel both the rawness of the materials (mostly wood and found objects) and the roughness of the process (dust, upcycling, and relearning). There is a collision of the organic and the transformative, playfully butting up against architecture and formalism.

James Sterling Pitt (b. 1977, Warwick, New York) earned his BFA from the University of New Mexico and his MFA from Mills College. Pitt currently divides his time between Houston, TX, and Santa Fe, NM, where he is the co-director of Best Western alongside the artist Shane Tolbert. He recently contributed text to Agnes Martin: Independence of Mind published by Radius Books in 2022.  In the past, he has held teaching positions at Berkley and Stanford. His work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; BioMarin Pharmaceutical, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, TX; the Cleveland Clinic Collection, OH; the Progressive Collection; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  His work has been exhibited in: JSP JBB: James Sterling Pitt & JB Blunk, Blunk Space, Point Reyes Station, CA, 2023;  and in the group exhibitions Salutary Sculpture, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Louis, MO, 2022; and Sensate Objects, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR."

Reception: April 13, 2024 | 2-5 pm

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