Pilson will be showing works selected from recent video and photography inspired by his ongoing interest in the architecture and people of New York. Pilson is mainly known for videos that explore the relationship between the order imposed by the modernist grid present throughout many contemporary structures and the often irrational and chaotic emotionality of the people it frames.
In recent works his fascination with architecture extends into the experience of time registered in traces of the past, which exist alongside the present everyday and how the effects of light and dark can affect our understanding and response to spaces.

A set of photographs and two videos take St Denis as their subject. Originally a thriving hotel built in the 1860s, the hotel boasts an eclectic past. Guests haveincluded Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant and the hotel hosted the first public demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Marcel Duchamp’s secret studio, where his last work Etant Données was discovered after his death, was located in the building and Lee Harvey Oswald at one time worked for another of the tenants. Currently the occupants consist almost entirely of psychoanalysts and massage therapists. Pilson’s black and white photographs capture the lost presences and incongruous details found in the empty rooms and corridors. In a series of vignettes the videowork St Denis surfaces aspects of the psychology and living theatre that underscores the building’s daily life. Alternate

Ending features a lantern slowly raised through a St Denis stairwell, simultaneously illuminating aspects of the architecture and casting shadows to create a sense of passage that ends before a closed door. Sidewalk is a steady paced recording that captures the glittering surface of the cement sidewalk. Ethereal and transient the work conveys a quiet and enticing beauty overlooked by the feet of passers-by and contrasted by the grime that stains every city floor. Dark Empire is a 25-minute shot, from dusk till dark, of the Empire State Building shot during the August blackout in New York City. Unavoidably reminiscent of Warhol’s 1964 Empire, this motionless and overbearing monolith of the modern age becomes consumed by an eroding darkness.

Recent exhibitions have included a solo show at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY; The Moderns at Castello di Rivoli, Turin and Moving Pictures at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NY. Pilson was awarded one of the Prizes for young Artists for his participation in the 2001 Venice Biennale.