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Romer Young Gallery

October 29 - December 5, 2010

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1240 22nd Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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It Goes As It Grows James Sterling Pitt, studio 2010
Opening October 29th, 6-9pm Ping Pong Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with San Francisco artist James Sterling Pitt. "It goes as it grows" presents a new series of sculptural abstracts, discrete objects, and diagrammatic works on paper that expose the artist’s unending and unfolding “mnemonic chronometer." Elemental and vital to his life and practice, Pitt uses his art as a memory aid or journal to grasp the elusiveness of memory, giving the passage of time a kind of materiality and shape that might otherwise escape him. Provisional, immediate, and raw, the works act as temporal agents linking meridians between the present, past, and future - shepherds guiding the artist’s movement between. By quietly hovering at this interstice, Pitt’s work evades any discrete end, each piece merely acting as a marker of time and place in the continuum of his life. Within the continuum of works on view at the gallery are objects that slip between painting and sculpture, painting and drawing, and drawing and sculpture. Some are recognizable and take the form of books, albums, or visually annotated lists; others are obscure and unknowable. The small sculptural abstracts share a kinship with the early Adaptives of Franz West, the Studio Works of Eva Hesse, the 1960’s small latex works of Louise Bourgeois, and the sculptural works from Cy Twombly’s time in Rome. Fresh and immediate, elusive and evocative, tactile and suggestive, the pieces stand for themselves and for the world of knowing that belongs to Pitt. When viewed together, these humble works appear as an inventory of objects, a catalogue raisonné that seems less about offering an exhaustive and coherent narrative for the viewer to access, than about giving space for the artist to shape his void of memory, and reconstruct his own interface between past and present, dream and reality, consciousness and memory, fragment and totality. Essentially, Pitt creates a user’s guide for himself, a way to ensure his own perpetual self-portrait. Pitt received his BFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 2000 and his MFA from Mills College in 2003. Pitt’s work has been exhibited nationally at The Lab, ATA Right Window, and ParkLife, San Francisco, CA; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Blankspace, Sight School and 4707 Telegraph, Oakland, CA; The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, and Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM.