M HKA Ensembles

Object, 33.02 x 91.44 x 101.60 cm.

Collection: Collectie Xavier Hufkens.

Jack Pierson (°1960, Plymouth, MA) lives and works in New York and Southern California. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2008. His work has been exhibited internationally.

Jack Pierson uses photography, drawing and sculpture to explore the complex emotional narratives surrounding historic and contemporary icons and iconography, and often creates work that can be read as a melancholic hymn to the subject of art and creation, fame, immortality and the passage of time. Delving into his own subconscious, the ideas and references explored in his work are deeply personal and spring from the artist’s inner intellectual and emotional world. Yet Pierson succeeds in transforming these private impulses into works of art that are, on the one hand, rooted in time and yet, on the other hand, seem to transcend it. His word sculptures are constructed from found objects – mismatched letters salvaged from junkyards, old movie marquees, roadside diners, Las Vegas casinos, and other abandoned enterprises. The letters are either arranged in abstract groupings, or combined to create individual words or phrases, and evoke a multiplicity of meanings. Pierson’s photographs and drawings also share a similar sense of specificity and plurality. The beauty of his work lies in its openness – each viewer brings his own interpretation to the work, one that is generated by their own memories and desire.

Psycho Killer from 2000 relies in part on former works in which Pierson uses found and recycled publicity lettering, reassembled from different sources, to make poetic or disruptive statements. Psycho Killer resembles a severed body, with all parts mixed up after a massacre.

Although this work was made in 2000, it seems a foreshadowing of the situation in which America has now slipped, with the psycho killer in the White House tearing a country's body to shreds.