settle for a good fantasy

settle for a good fantasy
Sep 11, 2026 – Oct 24, 2026

United States United States — Art Gallery
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

settle for a good fantasy at Luhring Augustine brings together four photographers—Janice Guy, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Shaun Pierson and David Seidner—who share an approach to portraiture that rejects idealization in favor of patchwork, slippage and unresolved form. On view from September 11 through October 24, 2026, in the gallery’s Chelsea space, the exhibition presents work that fractures and reintegrates its subjects, allowing questions to dominate over answers.

Guy, who began making photographic self-portraits in the 1970s while studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, returns to the medium after years focused on exhibition making and co-founding Murray Guy in New York. Her images often treat the self as a site of experimentation, using costume, gesture and setting to complicate rather than clarify identity. Mama-Nitzberg, an MFA graduate of Art Center College of Design, works across photography, collage and installation, building portraits from disparate sources that resist seamless cohesion. His work is held in collections including the Walker Art Center and MOCA Los Angeles.

Pierson, the youngest artist in the show and a recent MFA graduate of Yale, was included in Luhring Augustine’s 2024 exhibition Tiptoeing through the Kitchen. His photographs weave together personal archives, staged scenes and found material to create nuanced, multi-faceted impressions of his subjects. Seidner, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1999, achieved early success as a fashion photographer in Paris, with work appearing throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and international editions of VOGUE. Alongside his commercial work, he pursued fine art photography and portraiture, much of which is now held by the International Center of Photography, which organized a 2024 survey, David Seidner: Fragments, 1977–99.

Together, the four artists embrace strategies in which the “puzzle pieces” will not, and should not, fit together seamlessly. Archetypal portrayals erode as slippages accumulate, and the imperfect becomes a pathway toward image-building. The exhibition does not offer a single theory of portraiture. Instead, it presents a set of practices in which identity is assembled, disassembled and reassembled, leaving space for ambiguity, contradiction and the kinds of fantasy that allow a subject to remain partially out of reach.

Image: © Shaun Pierson


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