The holidays are over. We have boomeranged back home after visiting our far-flung relatives and have taken countless new family portraits; someone’s face always blurry, a smile or two relaxing into a strained frown, a squirming baby angling a little hand towards the family dog. It seems appropriate that Job Piston’s second solo-exhibition at Silverman Gallery, We Took a Family Portrait, would be shown this time of year. Despite it’s title, however, Piston’s show lacks the literal presence of a family.

Instead, the artist opted to photograph his grandfather’s garden in Taichung City, Taiwan—the former backdrop for family portraits in the past. Piston has also included images taken with his cell phone camera, unique chromogenic prints reproduced by exposing color photographic paper to the light emanating from his computer monitor. On the gallery’s front windows, a staccato text piece advertises words and saying’s culled from the artist’s recent journey. A lilting poetry pervades Piston’s meditation on resurrected family ties and shifting commercial culture, all as witnessed through the stretched materials of an expanded photography.

Piston’s photograms softly distort the Taiwanese urban landscape. Focusing on distinctly American advertising schemes, nighttime views of the urban sprawl, and images teetering on the edge of abstraction, the work offers an insider’s view of an increasingly globalized society with a somber, emotive quality of an outsider struggling to find a place within his cultural heritage. Piston’s images evoke a sense of yearning.

Piston cites the motivation for his photogram process as a desire to combine everyday usage of digital technology with traditional analog photographic materials. Cell phone camera snapshots and Twitter updates (echoed through the front window text piece) juxtaposed against straight camera images of an overgrown garden provide the artist, and the viewer, with an intuitive observation of a social paradigm shift. Outside of the artist’s play with the specifics of the medium, each of us can relate with our own affective history to these images, find our own emotional exchanges with something as universal as family. The work’s ephemeral nature transcends the notion of strict documentation—instead denoting an insightful discourse on one’s own cultural constitution.

-Parker Tilghman

(Images: Job Piston, Grandfather's Garden A, Taichung City, Taiwan September 2010, Chromogenic Print, 16×20 Inches. Untitled (New, Photogram, 2010, 8.5 × 10 Inches. Untitled (Black and White), Photogram, 2010, 8.5 × 10 Inches; Untitled (Two Cans), Photogram, 201o, 8.5 × 10 Inches)