Matthew Pillsbury, “Sitting on the High Line, Thursday, November 10, 2011,” archival pigment ink print (image courtesy Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York)
CITY STAGES
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday, March 12, suggested donation $5, 6:30
Exhibition continues through March 27
www.aperture.org
www.matthewpillsbury.com
In such series as “Screen Lives,” “Time Frame,” and “City Stages,” French-born photographer Matthew Pillsbury has taken pictures of New York and other urban locations (London, Paris, Vancouver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami) with a black-and-white eight-by-ten camera, using exposures ranging from a few minutes to an hour. The results are mysterious, mesmerizing photos that capture several moments in time at once, a kind of past, present, and future rolled together in an often ghostly evocation of an alternate reality mimicking our own. “City Stages” features such locales as Zuccotti Park, the High Line, the Main Reading Room in the New York Public Library, and Washington Square Park in addition to such events as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Village Halloween Parade, and the Lunar New Year Parade, while “Time Frame” goes to the Guggenheim, Grand Central, and the American Museum of Natural History; “Screen Lives” features more personal interiors, with shots of people in rooms with a television on. In conjunction with his current show at Aperture, Pillsbury will be at the Chelsea gallery on March 12 at 6:30 to lead a tour of the exhibition and to sign copies of his first monograph, City Stages (Aperture, October 2013, $55.25), which contains works from all three series. The “City Stages” exhibit will remain on view through March 27 at Aperture; in addition, Pillsbury’s “Nate and Me,” which focuses on the photographer and his former partner who still works with him, is running at Sasha Wolf on Orchard St. through April 20.