WPA 510 Bernard Street Los Angeles, CA 90012 Tel. (213) 503-5762 www.wpala.com )black( Solo exhibition by John Pearson September 2 - 25, 2010 Gallery Hours: Thursday - Saturday, 12 - 6pm Opening Reception: Saturday, September 4, 6 - 9pm WPA is proud to present )black(, a solo exhibition by John Pearson featuring a new video and selection of photographs. Both the video and photographs are primarily taken throughout Griffith Park; the observatory, its gallery of dioramas and the figurative sculptures on its grounds, and the nearby quarry tunnels known as Bronson Caves. The photographs are associative observations of phenomena; in combination they are an insight into Pearsonʼs experience of place. They are not a cataloging of the parkʼs sites and landscape. They are distillations of rock, light, dirt, darkness, which reveal both an intuitive fascination with elemental incidents, and an examination of an individualʼs actual and perceptual place in the world. When presented in unison the starkness of the black and white photographs along with the layered, color saturated video elaborate an exploration of the dynamics of light to vision. In discussing this work Pearson offers fundamental questions about vision and its dependence on light - What is vision? How do you represent vision? How do you come to terms with the assumptions of vision? Can the camera represent this? How can the camera be more closely aligned with the body? The silent video 780,000,000 Miles Away adds time, color, and motion to Pearsonʼs observations and experiences. Its title comes from an announcement that Pearson heard while waiting in line to see Saturn through the Griffith Park Observatoryʼs huge telescope. It was the distance that particular night from Earth to the planet Saturn. Among the imagery of this work is footage of the Bronson Caves along with the gouged out eyes of the bronze bust of James Dean on the observatory grounds. Both operate as crude apertures constraining but still receiving light into a sheltered dark interior. This association conveys a sense of the artist's inquiry. Aligning these disparate apertures he evokes bodily vision and creates a direct experience of the perception and sensation of light. These photographs and video extend beyond explanatory representations, and into propositions that interrogate our assumptions about vision and take pleasure in a base and direct revelry of phenomena. Avoiding a systematic and arbitrary legibility, this work engages a broader capacity of the medium and the viewer in an exploration of the affinities between vision, subject, and mechanical apparatus. An evening screening of a broad selection of the artist's videos will be presented at WPA on Thursday, September 23 at 8pm.

notes on )black( I keep returning to black as the dark space inside the body behind the eyes but also the black of our galaxy. One encompasses the visible world and the other is its ultimate point of visual reception. This blackness precedes legibility; it's the landscape before light finds it. Sunlight carves out definition from this blackness providing a means of perceptual assumption/extraction. There are many opinions on black - it's no color at all or it's all colors. I see black as essential and linked to the body and that light and vision are dependent on it. In photographs blackness is often considered at odds with legibility (details lost in shadow). I find that legibility is often overrated, and often not a measure of meaning. Photography is submissive to light. Light provides clarity, illumination, and it generates photographic information. Optically the body functions as a blind spot. Light enters the eyes and is enveloped in black. My handling of the camera and the medium is an attempt to tether vision to the body, to create images that make sense with actual experience rather than accentuate the mechanical optics of a systematic legibility. John Pearson August 2010