JSP JBB: James Sterling Pitt and JB Blunk

January 14 – Extended to March 4, 2023

JSP JBB is the first exhibition featuring James Sterling Pitt at Blunk Space and includes nine new works by Pitt and four sculptures by JB Blunk from the 1970s and 80s. This exhibition is produced in collaboration with Ratio 3 and presented jointly with their exhibition James Sterling Pitt: Ways, January 20 – March 4, 2023 and a collaborative presentation at FOG Art Fair between Ratio 3 and Nonaka-Hill.

Pitt’s new series is sculpted from clay, a material he began to experiment with after returning to New Mexico and beginning to collaborate with his stepfather. He explains the tactility and quietness of clay aligned with his drawing practice, and he appreciated how quickly he could remove information from and carve into the material. The new series features one wall mounted work alongside eight freestanding sculptures. The objects are manifestations of both his daily experiences and memories, thresholds into both inner and outer realities.

After suffering a traumatic brain injury in a car accident over 15 years ago, Pitt started to keep an object journal. The journal is an archive of drawings that calendar his daily experiences and is also a starting point for new forms. The drawings helped Pitt cope with short-term memory loss and difficulties with language. Through the process of drawing and sculpting, he was able to give form to the world around him, both perceived and imagined landscapes.

The motifs employed in this new series—arches, doorways, bricks, windows—suggest architectural features of Pitt’s adobe home. Layered into the works are other shapes, lines, and colors that create portals into both the immediate landscape around his home and studio but also the dreamscapes of his inner world. Thresholds are a theme and archetypal form that both Pitt and JB Blunk explore. “These new works,” explains Pitt, “express a transition between my body, mind, dreams, daily experiences, the architecture and home I inhabit, and the surrounding landscapes outside my windows.”

The directness and liminality of a ceramic object made by Blunk in 1970, that exists as both a tray and a sculpture, was especially informative. Blunk made this piece by rolling out a clay body and slicing the surface with four primary shapes. These extrusions provide both stability and depth to the object. The attention to materiality and manipulation of the elements is what bridges the two artists' practices. Pitt wants these new sculptures to exist in a liminal space between the physical and the ethereal and be perceived as constructs or vessels for lived experiences.

James Sterling Pitt (b. 1977, Warwick, New York) earned his BFA from the University of New Mexico and his MFA from Mills College. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Berlin, and most recently at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MI, and the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, OR. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Blanton Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum.