JAMES STERLING PITT

The tactility, the quietness of ceramic, it feels more present and direct but also demands a different timing and planning which is more like a cycle or clock.”

-James Sterling Pitt
B. 1977 WARWICK, NEW YORK

LIVES AND WORKS IN HOUSTON, TX, & SANTA FE, NM

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Photograph by Krysta Jabczenski

James Sterling Pitt’s artistic process is one of exploring and honoring the often abstract and unknown realms of memories and their emotional counterparts. His sculptures, even in their most austere form, allow for intimacy and tenderness while the playful and illustrative forms maintain a sense of gravity.

For many years Pitt’s artistic practice served as an autobiographical image bank, representing particular memories, places, and sensations. Fleeting sightings and experiences were reinterpreted as two and three dimensional reconstructions; standing as surrogates for images lost during momentary, perceptual shifts. Having suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident over ten years ago, this way of working began as a tool to help cope with short-term memory loss and difficulties with language. Through a process of drawing and sculpture, he was able to give form to the less concrete and harder to articulate aspects of the mind, such as something sensed or a fading memory.

Pitt’s latest sculptures are intuitive, developed in response to their formal precedents, taking cues from each other, and using familiar materials to unexpected ends. While still drawing influence from memories, art historical influences, or any number of lived experiences, Pitt’s new sculptures are ultimately constructed according to instinct where the artist’s history and past work are reinterpreted and absorbed into the forms themselves.
James Sterling Pitt

Untitled, 2011

pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper

30 x 22 ½ inches

James Sterling Pitt continues to create from modest materials at modest scales. Made primarily from hand-cut wood and acrylic paint, the sculptures have a commonplace, relational quality. Where one surface is clearly legible as layered and cut plywood, other surfaces are coarse, pocked, and stone-like. The works evoke organic materials that have been petrified or fossilized, and geologic materials that have been shaped through accumulation and weathering. On close examination, the sculptures reflect the artist’s hand yet remain fluid and organic, suggesting that despite their handmade construction, each sculpture might be the result of complex phases of growth, erosion, or evolution.

James Sterling Pitt (b. 1977, Warwick, New York) earned his BFA from the University of New Mexico and his MFA from Mills College. Pitt’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Berlin, and in group exhibitions at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MI, and the Scheneider Museum of Art is Ashland, OR., as well as throughout the Bay Area and New York. Most recently his work was shown in dialogue with JB Blunk at Blunk Space. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Blanton Museum, Austin, TX, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
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Works
Exhibitions
- JAMES STERLING PITT
  DECODER (LOST SCULPTURE AND A FEW IDEAS) 13 Apr - 18 May 2024
  
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