Los Angeles-based artist Anthony Pearson (b. 1969) is well-known for his highly formalized and sensitive use of both process and materials. By experimenting with the formal limits of photography, where Pearson’s practice originated, he found a visual vocabulary rooted in abstraction that explores the balances between positive and negative, lightness and darkness. He continues to investigate these dichotomies in media such as plaster, bronze, and clay. His use of the materials elevates their inherent qualities and yields understated poetic experiences within them. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Pearson can be categorized as a second generation Light & Space artist who asks us to look closer at the medium, its environment and its effects. The Embedment series marks a shift in Pearson’s experimentation with hydrocal—a gypsum cement that he infuses with pigments—which he first began using in 2011. For this series, he stretches a segment of fabric within a mold and then pours the liquid cement, which he has variously colored, atop the fabric, layering, shifting, and allowing it to coalesce organically within the confines of the supports. Once the material sets, Pearson removes the hardened cement from the frame and pulls the canvas from its face, which leaves intricate patterned impressions and traces of fiber filament on the surface plane. In this way the skin and body of the work are created concurrently, as the fields of color weave together into abstract landscapes, where suggestions of sunsets and desert views dissipate as quickly as they emerge. Made in reverse, with the front of the work facing downward in the frame, the process embodies Pearson’s deep knowledge of the material, integrating his original vision for each work with the naturally arising effects. Questions of perception, light, and physicality merge, resulting in objects that elude easy categorization. Pearson's work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.