A concise introduction to the Jack Pierson's photographs, collages, word sculptures and more across four decades.
This volume celebrates and documents the career of pioneering New York–based artist and photographer Jack Pierson. Published on the occasion of Pierson's tenth solo presentation with Regen Projects, Los Angeles, this full-color publication illustrates works produced over 35 years of the artist's multidisciplinary practice. Arranged as a poetic, achronological and comprehensive installation that tracks Pierson's diverse yet idiosyncratic practice, the exhibition and publication create a personal sojourn through the artist's career. Featuring a new contribution by Evan Moffitt that surveys the artist's body of work in relation to queer cultural zeitgeists of the 1990s, a conversation between the artist and Andy Campbell, and an essay by Bruce Benderson, Less and more shines new light on Pierson's oeuvre.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Regen Projects Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2021.
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 Americanlandscape.
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”.