Jack Pierson

Jack Pierson employs photography, collage, sculptural assemblage and installation in pursuit of love, longing, kinship, poetry, celebration, youth, fantasy and identity. The artist’s mode of non-hierarchical cultural compilation and a process of impulse-led editing allows Pierson to create personal and universal narratives across his multidisciplinary practice. Emerging from the 1980s milieu of the Boston School of documentarian photographers, Pierson was instead drawn into a world of gendered, punk-influenced performativity, and was greatly influenced by the more tactile work of his friend, Mark Morrisroe.

Pierson’s move to New York via stays in Miami and Los Angeles saw the evolution of staging in his work. Depicting recollections of autobiographical nights out and days in the studio, he constructed melancholic sets of half-remembered experiences and occasional, ironic gestures of self-portraiture. Pierson’s collagistic approach also applies to his photography and ongoing accumulations of imagery, which evoke shared notions of reminiscence and desire. His first word sculptures, composed of discarded signage letters removed from their intended context, were found on the streets of New York’s East Village and introduced a multiplicity of meaning into Pierson’s practice. They question what is staged and what is casual, a theme that is unquestionably his own, in which material, object, subject, fragment and life all coalesce.