Job Piston
We Took A Family Portrait / 我們拍了一張全家福
December 17 – January 29th, 2011
Opening reception: December 18th, 5 -7 pm

Silverman Gallery is pleased to present We Took A Family Portrait, an exhibition of new work by Job Piston on view from December 17th through January 29th, 2011.

The artist’s second solo show at the gallery features a series of photograms, 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.

Job Piston was born in 1983, and received his MFA from UCLA. His work has been exhibited extensively, including at The San Francisco Arts Commission; Spinello Gallery, Miami; Artist Space, New York and MAK Center, Los Angeles. He has been reviewed in Artforum and Frieze, and most recently was included in the group exhibition, Wild Thing at Roberts & Tilton. Piston currently lives and works in Los Angeles.