Intersected: Image, Object, Print, and Time

A Solo Exhibition of Photographic Mixed Media Works by

TIMOTHY PERSHING

AUGUST 13 – OCTOBER 2, 2022

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About the Artist

Timothy Pershing

Tim Pershing has worked in film, photojournalism, and environmental activism, but making art has been a constant throughout his life. In his earliest years, he could be found in the 150-year-old basement of his family home, creating sculptures and altars from the stashes of old lamps, wood, books, and whatever paints were to be found. A darkroom expert and aficionado, Tim has been creating his photographic mixed media works since the 70s, inspired by his life and studies in Paris at that time. He cites Gordan Parks, Jerry Ulesman, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus as early influences.

Having worked as a key grip for films directed by John Sayles, Mira Nair, Robert Altman, and others, In the eighties, he landed a job that took him to Haiti, where he and his wife and painter Franceska Schifrin fell in love with the island nation. Haiti continues to inspire and inform both of their artistic production to this day. After years of traveling to Haiti, and after earning his PhD. in International Relations at Brandeis University, in 1995 Tim was hired to be the Political Analyst and Communication Director for the International Mission to Monitor Haitian Elections. In addition to Haiti, both artists traveled to other lands, including Uganda, Bosnia, and Cuba, digesting and documenting those conflicted societies while creating dynamic, potent, and exciting bodies of work around them.

For the last ten years, Tim has worked with the offices of LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and Assemblymember Richard Bloom, focused on environmental issues such as wildfires, climate change, and habitat preservation, all while continuing to create a considerable amount of art—both cerebral and emotional— much of which is included in this exhibition. Laced into the intersection of politics, war, justice, science, and the human condition, the work here reflects on time, religion, economics, planetary survival, and sometimes, joy.

Tim has two children, Maya and Jasper, with his wife Franceska Schifrin. They live in Topanga, California.

About the Works in this Exhibition

These works encompass a time period between 1863 to 2022. Elements within the sculptural aspect of these images include letters with dated stamps in 1893 to ledger pages from Haiti dated in the early 1900s, to 21st-century digital prints of images from 1964 to 2022. This show features works that originate from film negatives and positives. They are rephotographed digitally through a variety of techniques that preclude digital manipulations, limiting them to color and contrast corrections and minimal resizing. Each piece began with a physical object: the actual piece of film in which light and chemistry mixed to produce the seed of each work here.

In addition to this origin, the mixed media component engages with and is transformed by the prints of that fraction of a second in time when they are created as B&W negatives and color positives. In return, the elements of the mixed media approach engage glass jars, both protective and encasing the images, presented as archeological findings from another time. Others are framed and accentuated by cultural and time-period marking elements from over century-old stamps and text from almanacs and newspapers from the dawn of the photographic age. 

Each detail is intended – whether it’s a brush stroke, ripped newspaper, or old wood— if it was accidental, it remained. if it spoke to or enhanced the work, a drip could remain. Often, the new element— its origin or color— could set the tone for a broad shift in the work. sometimes a piece might be reworked, aged, finished; then, decidedly unfinished, revisited. I have been working on some of these pieces for over three decades.