“Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.” These words, taken from Fran Lebowitz and written on the wall to warn all ye who enter Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea gallery, set up the premise for its current group show: settle for a good fantasy.
It’s an admittedly juicy quotation. So juicy, indeed, that the gallery has hung Shaun Pierson’s photograph of a very voluptuous strawberry — seriously, it’s like the Venus of Willendorf of strawberries — right next to it, as if to underscore the point: Photography is always chasing a fantasy.
The exhibition’s main room leans into this, showing portraiture's fragmentary, erotic side. Works by Pierson, David Seider, and Janice Guy vacillate between intimacy and unknowability, like a fractured peep show. Curved, freckled backs touch. Beautiful shards of women’s faces are pieced together, seemingly pulled from the dark. Guy’s grids of self-portraits from the 1970s are particularly arresting, and not just because she also happens to be beautiful.