LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects presents an exhibition of new works by New York artist Jack Pierson. Pierson's oeuvre is extraordinary: photography, sculpture, installation, painting, bookmaking and drawing. His subject matter and iconography deals with themes of loss, longing, faded glamour and nostalgia. Working with narratives that are both familiar and removed, Pierson constructs fiction to explore memory. Desire drives the work in whatever shape it takes and that desire is inextricably linked to beauty, conventional or unexpected. Beauty in his work often has a darker side, showing the most intimate moments where beauty becomes tragedy and decadence becomes decay. The two themes, prevalent in Pierson's investigation, elude definition, refuse conformity and attempt to describe the indescribable.
For his seventh solo exhibition at Regen Projects, Pierson will show a selection of works on paper, photographs and sculptures. Composing an atmosphere, these works have the quality of capturing a moment, a fragment of a larger story where the narrative continues beyond the frame. One of the exhibition's cinematic images titled Roses confronts the viewer with a visible horizon while the road stretches ahead; a horizon that promises possibility but also distance.
Pierson works with a variety of materials in different forms, yet the photograph is at the center of his expression and informs much of his sculptural work. He belongs to a lineage of American photographers who have focused their camera on the ordinary, especially local architecture and roadside signs….The photographs…look beyond the merely descriptive to understand what is universal and beautiful in the banal artifacts in everyday life by extracting them from their context and re-envisioning them as a photographic entity.
(Marshall, Richard. Jack Pierson: Angel Youth, published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, p. 392-393)
Accompanying this body of recent photographic work is a series of enigmatic graphite drawings. What the drawings share with the photographs and sculptures is a sense of documenting or recording an experience, real and imagined. Pierson offers an impression rather than a representation that resonates with the viewer, lingering with a melancholy gaze. Pierson's iconic word sculptures, assembled from mismatched sign letters, form a collected experience. As a result the exhibition presents a continuation of Pierson's formal and philosophical exploration of the human condition.
Pierson's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including El Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga, Spain; The Irish Museum of Art, Dublin, Ireland; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. Extensive monographs and publications have been published about the work including Desire Despair , Angel Youth and Jack Pierson .
