Jack Pierson employs photography, collage, sculptural assemblage and installation in pursuit of love and identity. The artist creates 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. 

In his first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in NYC, Jack Pierson features Pomegranates, an all-encompassing installation, where the artist mixes photography, and assemblage, to reflect the emotional undercurrents of daily life. In this spectacular show, Pierson offers situations exploring redemption and desire. Constructed using magazine pages, photographs, drawings, vintage posters, and other memorabilia, the arrangements are layered and fastened to ten by fifteen-foot metal panels, creating a tonal and thematic connection between each object.

Photography, in one form or another, has always been at the core of Pierson’s output. In this exhibition, he delivers the well-chosen fruit of his endeavors in the studio over the last three years. Known for his lush, saturated colour photography, Pierson’s new series of work takes on black-and-white studio photography as a means to investigate intimacy. In Lucian (2023), the model assumes an academic pose, his body’s graceful curvature enunciated with a salient luster, his countenance captured in a soft, focused contemplation–even in his composed stasis–as every contour of his physique is transformed into a node of sexual possibility.

Pierson’s process of continuously adding and rearranging the diverse components on the wall can be indicative of a collector’s mindset. Each material is afforded a highly-charged presence within the whole; works made by Pierson, purchased or found in his travels are set with exquisite, lapidary skill. For the first time, Pierson’s own watercolors and drawings have been embedded in the new Arrays.

In addition to the Arrays, Pierson is debuting a new suite of sculptures fashioned from silver painted plywood found in his studio. Continuing an approach of assemblage that he began during time alone during the pandemic, Pierson has erected these freestanding objects in a way that can be read both as plinths or furniture, and they act as structures for the arrangement and display of various materials already within his studio. These may include Pierson’s early 90s drawings or found photographs, alongside collected folk art, shells, exhibition posters and other ephemera. The works sit alongside other sculptural pieces, Kodak Composition (2023), Bed Springs (2023) and Hanging Wood (2023). They provide a structure for storytelling and the presentation of objects not necessarily made to be art, but that the artist wishes to be treated as art, archived, curated, and brought forth. The process of bringing forth is an ongoing celebration Pierson makes of what has gone before and what might be in danger of being overlooked. 

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