Artist's Biography

Christina Pierson received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. In keeping with her penchant for the succinct, Pierson attempts to boil things down to convey as much as possible with as little as she can. Her work is less about achieving that perfect concise formula and more about the process of trying to get there. In her search for that one punctuated statement that makes you see something in a way that you’ve never seen it before, she discovers new ways of seeing the world around her. She starts superficial and moves to more complex understandings. Pierson gains these vantage points through the lens of a camera, by manipulating her subjects in real space, and by taking them out of their original context. Through these perspectives, the world expands and contracts in her work as she manipulates contexts and moves between extreme perspectives.

Curator's Biography

Benjamin Ball works at the nexus of installation, architecture, and industrial design. He is one half of Ball-Nogues Studio, a Los Angeles-based design and fabrication practice that creates experimental built environments to enhance and celebrate the potential for social interaction through sensation, spectacle, and physical engagement by working with unusual materials, developing new digital tools, and applying architectural techniques in unorthodox ways. With collaborator Gaston Nogues, Ball has exhibited at major institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim Museum; MoMA PS1; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; the Venice Biennale; the Hong Kong | Shenzhen Biennale; and the Beijing Biennale. The pair has received numerous honors including two AIA Design Awards, United States Artists Fellowships, and a grant from the Graham Foundation. In 2007, they won the Museum of Modern Arts Young Architects Program Competition, and recently, their work became part of the collection of MoMA. Benjamin Ball has taught in the graduate architecture programs at SCI-Arc, UCLA, and USC. The work of Ball-Nogues has appeared in publications worldwide including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Architectural Record, Artforum, Icon, Log, Architectural Digest, and Sculpture.