Eric Pickersgill
ARTIST STATEMENT
In 2014, in a café in Troy, New York, I watched a family sit together without speaking. A father and two daughters each looked into their phones while the mother stared out the window. I wrote down what I saw, and a few weeks later I lay in bed beside my wife, Angie, both of us lit by our screens, and realized it was a photograph. That was the beginning of Removed.
For ten years I have asked people, in more than a dozen countries, to hold the pose of someone using a device. I take the device away and make the photograph. What remains is posture, focus, and a hand shaped around something that isn’t there. The work is about absence, but it started from love. I have photographed my own family in this gesture, and I am still in it myself.
This show puts that work across the room from Séan Alonzo Harris’s portraits. His photographs do what mine cannot. They hold the unmistakable feeling that someone is home on the other side of the picture. Where Removed shows people beside each other and out of reach, Séan’s portraits show what reaching looks like when it works. Ling-Wen Tsai’s Sitting Quietly gives us a place to listen, and Elizabeth Ross Holmstrom’s mindfulness events keep the gallery open as a place to gather. I think of our title as a question and a dare, and I’m happy to let it be both. If I could add one line to the wall, it would be where a search begins: the point last seen.
I am a father of three and a husband in an era that makes it easy to be in the room and elsewhere. This fall, for the first time in nine years, all three of my kids are in school full days, and I have noticed how much I want to be fully present for them while they are still at home. The show opens just before the holidays, the season we most want to be together and most notice when we aren’t. I hope people come, look at each other, and stay a while.
-Eric Pickersgill
Fall 2026
