While studying at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Jack Pierson
(born 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, lives and works in New York City and
Southern California) became associated with a group of
photo
artists who would become known as the
Boston School, of which
Nan Goldin was also a central figure. Pierson's practice embodies an array of
media spanning from
wall-drawings,
word-pieces, installations,
drawings,
sculpture,
paintings
and photographs. His photographic works have often been compared to images
from road movies, movies whose rapturous race toward fulfilment have become
etched into the
American landscape.
His favourite subjects are drawn mostly from his daily life as a
contemporary artist: fragments of urban landscapes, still lives of ordinary
objects,
homoerotic nudes,
evocative words worked into
collages
or transformed into neons. Far from simply seeking to create traditional
variations on the American Dream, the artist seeks instead to explore the
flip side of the concept, searching to express what he calls “the tragedy
inherent in the pursuit of
glamour”.
