Jack Pierson, Stay (1992), via Regen Projects
Spanning the full width and breadth of his career, Regen Projects is currently presenting a selection of works by the artist Jack Pierson, underscoring his ongoing and extensive practice, and its engagement with themes of memory, desire, longing, beauty, despair, loss, and glamour.Arranged as a poetic, achronological, and comprehensive installation, Less and more tracks Pierson’s diverse yet idiosyncratic practice.
Jack Pierson, Less and more (Installation View), via Regen Projects
Although Pierson emerged as the youngest member of the Boston School, which included fellow photographers David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Nan Goldin, Pierson would branch out into a range of media, exploring drawing, painting, collage, installation, and text-based sculpture, always focused on wrangling with the beauty and banality of daily life, and manifesting romantic affect, longing, and desire through everyday material, rough sketches, and charged turns of phrase.
Jack Pierson, Less and more (Installation View), via Regen Projects
The show makes these notions explicit, running through his works with a sense of both the artist’s intimacy and the broad strokes which constitute some of his more potent works. Early sculptures and installations recalling and even reconstructing slices of the domestic will also be brought together for the exhibition to showcase Pierson’s ability to imbue objects with the tenderness we often associate with the intimate space of the home, even when the work suggests another locale. What You Take With You and What You Leave Behind, a sculpture from 1994, for instance, draws power from the absence of a body, a work that pulls increasing power from the more recent text piece AIDZ just a few feet away, a conversation through time that charges his past work with concrete contexts through which to appreciate his own narratives and the ongoing thematics of his work.
Jack Pierson, Less and more (Installation View), via Regen Projects
Drawing on these potent signifiers and the taut sense of execution that dominates so much of the artist’s work, Less and more is a powerful yet concise look at Pierson’s output over the past decades, and places the artist’s work into a powerful conversation with both the past and today.
The show closes October 23rd.
– J. Shrine
Read more:
Jack Pierson: Less and more [Exhibition Site]
