settle for a good fantasy

Luhring Augustine is delighted to announce an exhibition entitled settle for a good fantasy, showcasing the work of four photographers, Janice Guy, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Shaun Pierson, and David Seidner. The exhibition will open at our Chelsea gallery on September 11 and run through October 31. Other than Pierson, who was included in Tiptoeing through the Kitchen: Recent Photography (April 2024), this will be the first presentation of these artist’s works at Luhring Augustine.

Sharing an approach to portraiture that rejects notions of idealization, these artists embrace strategies of patchworking in which the “puzzle pieces” will not, and should not, fit together seamlessly. Eschewing the classical approach of emphasizing a cohesive ideal, they each weave a picture of their subjects from disparate sources of information to create nuanced and multi-faceted impressions. For these artists, the imperfect and the unresolved are paramount: fracturing, then reintegration becomes a pathway towards image-building, slippages erode archetypal portrayals, and questions dominate over answers.

Janice Guy (b. 1953, London, UK) began making photographic self-portraits in the 1970s while studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, and her first solo show of that work was in 1979 at Galerie Ricke in Cologne. By the mid-1980s her medium evolved from photography to exhibition making, first in Rome and Naples, Italy, then in New York, where she co-founded the gallery Murray Guy in 1998. In 2007, her photographs re-emerged and she has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; The Apartment, Vancouver; and Higher Pictures, New York.

Joe Mama-Nitzberg (b. 1965, Santa Clara, CA) received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. His work has been presented at O-Town House, Los Angeles; The University Art Museum at UAlbany, NY; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; and White Columns, New York. His work is in the collection of The Tang Teaching Museum; The Bunker, West Palm Beach; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and MOCA Los Angeles.

Shaun Pierson (b. 1997, Bridgeton, NJ) received his MFA from Yale University School of Art. In 2023, he was a recipient of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program residency in New York. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and has been included in exhibitions at Luhring Augustine, New York; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; and AMANITA, New York, among others. His work has also been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue Italia, Document Journal, and Cultured Magazine, among others.

David Seidner (b. 1957, Los Angeles, CA – d. 1999, Miami Beach, FL). At seventeen Seidner moved to Paris to work as a fashion photographer, and by nineteen his pictures were appearing on major magazine covers, soon after he had his first solo exhibition in 1978. Based in Paris for most of his career, Seidner was a hugely successful fashion photographer with his photographs appearing throughout the 1980’s and 90’s in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s & Queen, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and international editions of VOGUE. He simultaneously privately pursued his fine art photography, while also establishing himself as a portraitist. Seidner died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1999, and his archive has been with The International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York since 2001, who organized a 2024 survey exhibition of his work: David Seidner: Fragments, 1977-99. His work is also held in the collections of Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, Villeurbanne, France; Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, France; and National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, among others.