“Time is, in fact, what I see as my main material.” – Leighton Pierce
Leighton Pierce is a child.
His works are filled with perceptions that only the most embryonic of minds can take hold of. Blurs of light and texture that go mostly unnoticed by the constant motion of the adult world become alien universes of the familiar. Minuscule swatches of time mimic the environmental landscape of information discerned by the guiltless innocence of the child. A child’s mind holds a near real-time version of memory, the only past is that of the immediate, and the future is not yet a concept beyond a matter of minutes. It is with these eyes that Pierce builds a Midwest mythology of the elevated ordinary, creating a new, uncorrupted grammar.
In The Back Steps, Pierce holds captive two little girls inside a twist of time, both in a constant departure from Leighton’s back porch steps into the yard beyond. This restless escape creates orographic cyclogenesis, the night becoming the mountainous walls that hold in the whirlwind of Halloween costumes and scurrying feet. Time folds in on itself, a panorama of endless disappearances, each scherzo slightly askew from the previous, following an internal logic of its own, unshared design.
by Red Cell
