Job Piston
Author: Glen Helfand

Silverman Gallery
WWW.SILVERMAN-GALLERY.COM

Photographers who traffic in the ambiguous, sensuous melancholy of youth are difficult to resist—especially when the not-unattractive artist is part of the picture. Evocatively named San Francisco–based artist Job Piston enters confidently into lithe-bodied, polysexual photographic territory with his consistent use of male and female nudity and the atmospheric light of low-rent interiors. The terrain is more Ryan McGinley than Larry Clark, as Piston is himself a twenty-four-year-old buck, but the photographs reveal a promisingly adult eye. Smooth, pale skin may be the lure, but the mood is more mysterious than celebratory. In an image titled Over the rainbow, 2007, a woman, wearing only a bra, is seen behind a sliding glass door; Piston is reflected in the exterior surface, and his stance and difficult-to-discern expression suggest both longing and distant fascination. The power of darkness, 2007, meanwhile, depicts the shirtless artist seen, through an amber haze, in a bathroom mirror. He flexes a muscle and generates an uncanny mix of self-consciousness and voyeurism. A back-room installation features artworks, selected by Piston, that express his indebtedness to his teachers, Todd Hido and Larry Sultan, and his “contemporaries,” among them Elizabeth Peyton, Dean Sameshima, and Wolfgang Tillmans. The latter are a presumptuous though fitting selection that outlines an artistic camp (call it the Butt magazine aesthetic), but the gesture comes across as self-serving rather than gracious. The presentation, however, seems forgivable, as Piston’s images have personality enough to stand on their own.