Jack Pierson
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
10 September - 9 October 2004
ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
4 Clifford Sreet, London W1X 1RB
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
10 September - 9 October 2004
Alison Jacques Gallery announces its inaugural exhibition featuring nine new word sculptures by American artist Jack Pierson. Assembled with plastic, wood and metal letters pirated from discarded commercial signage, Jack Pierson’s sculptural aphorisms denote a parallel universe of seduction, wistful yearning, and false promise. The letters, which are salvaged from junkyards, derelict movie houses, roadside diners, and other forsaken enterprises, consolidate disparate relics from the commercial American landscape into a concise and personal visual rhetoric. The letters are alternately weathered, shimmering, rugged, gilded, or down-at-heel. They suggest an American voice trying to express a sense of authority long since mired in dust and disappointment.
The new word sculptures continue Jack Pierson’s taste for the gritty and blunt, tantalising us with promises of ‘TRUTH’ and ‘LOVE,’ only to dash the dream with deceit and accusation: ‘YOU ROTTEN PRICK’. Appropriately, ‘PORNOGRAPHY’ hangs in the balance, promising ‘ANYTHING YOU WANT’ with a cynical wink acknowledging that earnest desire is a meagre commodity in today’s transitive, heavily mediated, post-sexual age.
Since the late 1980s, Jack Pierson has been promiscuous in his art, producing drawings, installations, sculptures and photographs. His work often functions like a series of film stills, communicating shudders of self-awareness caught between here and there, public and private. This diverse practice is intent on smudging the distinctions between autobiography and a curiosity with popular culture’s darker corners. Jack Pierson has long been fascinated by the props and clichés of distressed glamour, lost time and thwarted desire. His work revels in its personality crisis, accommodating the allusions and delusions from which his life has been constructed.
Jack Pierson’s acclaimed early photographs capture nostalgia for an elusive golden boy bohemia. They are personal, diaristic, fleeting and flagrantly sentimental. His more recent photography parallels the tone of the new word sculptures. It is increasingly indebted to established codes of commercial, homoerotic portraiture without forsaking the previous work’s autobiographical impulse and heavyhearted charm. Pornography is indeed the subtext, but so–according to Jack Pierson–is self-portraiture. As his confessional, romantic persona retreats into a growing constellation of conceptual, soft-core surrogates; his visual vocabulary similarly constructs itself from the ruins of desire and consumption.
Jack Pierson was born in Massachusetts (1960). In addition to ‘Regrets’, a solo retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, recent museum shows include: The Whitney Biennial, New York and ‘Electric Dreams’, The Barbican London. Solo shows include Cheim and Read, New York and ‘Self-Portraits’, Regan Projects, Los Angeles.
ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
4 Clifford Sreet, London W1X 1RB
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
