Events

Slow Life by Jamie Sterling Pitt on view August 1-30, presented by Nature of Things

Nature of Things is pleased to announce “Slow Life,” an upcoming exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and sculpture by Houston-based artist, Jamie Sterling Pitt, opening Saturday, August 1st at Jardin, 2608 Dunlavy St, Houston, TX 77098.

A still life is a marker of a time stopped— the lemon is perennially plump, the flower is suspended, head hanging in wilt. A slow life, then may be measured by the speed of a breeze upon a leaf or a peripatetic pace on a sidewalk.

Jamie Sterling Pitt titled the exhibition “Slow Life”, as a proposal for living, and a reference to his way of making work in a post-traumatic brain injury life. How radical it is to be slow in a world that is clanging in your ear and tugging at your sleeve, and what better time and place it is to experience the cosmically mundane than in the suspended humidity of Houston in August.

The works in this exhibition were made in Pitt’s garage studio attached to his house in the nearby Montrose neighborhood. The series of paintings in the exhibition are organic tableaus that contain Pitt’s sculptural works and studio objects (books and tools) in arrangement. The meta-still-life (slow life, rather), is a conversation in the consideration of shapes, bodies, and shadows in abstracted realism—the way that Pitt sees after his accident. The surfaces of the paintings are heavily textured, a layer of skin alchemized through charged matter: sawdust off-cast from making sculptures, dried native flowers, “holy” water. The sculptures are pastel planes of shapes, layered into tableau, and quizzical in material (wood? foam?). The shapes and shadows within the works are flattened, but they are not still—they, and his work are slow resilience.

As Mary Oliver gives us in her instructions for living “pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.”

 

Sunday, August 30 6-8pm