(early works and beyond)

The theater will never find itself again… i.e., constitute a means of true illustration—except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his canabalism, pour out, on a level not counterfit and illususory, but interior…

- Artaud as quoted by Jack Pierson

Over the years, Pierson has influentially set forth a strangely American Artaud like social erotic theater – a collision of flat and sculptural works assembled from the discards of popular culture. These artworks become the base material from which dreams “pour out” in immutable ways. Despite critical acceptance for his early assemblages, Pierson became associated with the Boston School of photography – a media with which he has always had an ambivalent affair. Yet his vision neccesitated disregard for media, in spite of a pressured nineties insistence on photography, impelling him (perhaps with relish) to performativly walk the line elaborating on his original themes (such as romantic cynicism, the entertainment industry, autobiographical insincerity, polymorphous sexuality, ransom notes and glamorous spectacle) with his now well know word signs, works on paper, wall drawings, photo collages, sculptures and cut outs – negotiating a vacant space between actor, artist, anti-hero and absence. Examined as a diversity of art practice, Pierson’s work over decades constitutes a “Gesamtkunstwerk” in the form of an unwieldly typewritten chronicle ouside linear time in broken syntax. Given Pierson’s countless word drawings and crossed out lists, it would be simplistic to summarize the grand scale of Pierson’s project, its depth of feeling, abundance of thought and iconoclastic nature. Hence this exhibition is a grouping of works oriented around open roads – ephemera, assemblage and textual play ripe for extraction.

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