Jack Pierson

Since his first solo exhibition in 1990, Jack Pierson has worked in a wide array of media, including photography, drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture. Taking his material from popular culture and urban subcultures, Pierson demonstrates a fascination with cliché. He uses various media to enact melancholic and romantic meditations on the pathos of daily life as experienced through memory. His work is about the yearning for glamour and celebrity and is perhaps allied with that of Andy Warhol and the Factory. Much of Pierson's work refers to the desire for fame that so often ends in broken dreams and failed hopes. As the artist himself puts it: "I see the work document the disaster inherent in the search for glamour--glamour being that which is not real." Pierson's Applause (1997) is a light box with the word Applause, referring to the cues used to direct the audience's reactions during live TV shows.