settle for a good fantasy

"Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy." Fran Lebowitz's line gives its name to a group show running through October 24 at Luhring Augustine's Chelsea gallery, featuring photographers Janice Guy, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Shaun Pierson and David Seidner.

The four share a wariness of the idealized portrait. Instead of a single cohesive image, each assembles a person from disparate scraps of information, and the puzzle pieces are not meant to lock together neatly. Fracturing a subject and then reintegrating it becomes the method; slippage undermines the archetype, and questions outweigh answers.

The checklist spans decades. Guy is represented by 1977 gelatin silver works, including a group of 35 prints, and a hand-colored set of five from 1978. Seidner, who left Los Angeles for Paris as a teenager and became a leading fashion photographer for Vogue and other magazines, appears with 1986–88 pieces: fragmented faces, mosaic-like fashion images and his "Enigma" series. Pierson shows 2026 pigment prints in artist frames, with subjects ranging from heads and torsos to strawberries and cherries, including "Untitled (Strawberry on Lace)".

Pierson, born in 1997 and a Yale MFA, was in the gallery's 2024 group show Tiptoeing through the Kitchen; for the other three artists this is a first showing at Luhring Augustine. The gallery is at 531 W 24th Street.