Luhring Augustine Tells Visitors to Settle for a Good Fantasy

Fran Lebowitz's words greet every visitor to Luhring Augustine's Chelsea gallery: "Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy." The quotation, painted on the wall, gives the gallery's current group exhibition its title — settle for a good fantasy.

It is an admittedly juicy line. The gallery treats it that way. Hung right beside the text is Shaun Pierson's photograph of a very voluptuous strawberry — seriously, the Venus of Willendorf of strawberries — as if to underscore the show's premise: photography is always chasing a fantasy.

The work in question is Pierson's "Untitled (Strawberry on Lace)" (2026), an archival pigment print that turns a piece of fruit into something closer to sculpture. The image size runs 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), framed at 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm).

What does the main room hold?

The exhibition's central space leans into the theme through portraiture's fragmentary, erotic side. Works by Shaun Pierson, David Seider, and Janice Guy vacillate between intimacy and unknowability — a fractured peep show.

Curved, freckled backs touch. Beautiful shards of women's faces are pieced together, seemingly pulled from the dark.

Guy's contribution stands out. Her grids of self-portraits, made in the 1970s, are particularly arresting — and not only because she also happens to be beautiful. One set, dated 1977, comprises eight gelatin silver prints, printed in 2026, offering a near-fifty-year span between exposure and reproduction that few gallery walls can claim.

Why does the Lebowitz quote matter here?

The wall text does more than set a tone. It frames the whole exhibition as an argument about the medium itself. If truth is off the table, the show suggests, photography's pursuit becomes something else — desire, assembly, illusion.

The pairing of quote and strawberry makes the point physically. Visitors read the injunction, then immediately see it enacted: an ordinary fruit rendered as an object of worship, lush and impossibly idealized.

The takeaway is simple: fantasy, in this Chelsea gallery, is not an escape from photography but its engine.

By Elena Vasquez