~JACK PIERSON/DANIEL REICH
the deceptively simple, yet creatively resonant card, on hard stock, 7 x 7″, spoke well for this show, JACK PIERSON, ‘Early Works and Beyond’, which ran from December 15 to January 28, 2006, at Daniel Reich Gallery. A beautifully paced overview of some of Jack’s best early work, the show worked really well in the gallery and resonanted well with the holiday season. Festive and solemn, at the same time, somehow.
(the card doesn’t scan to justice, there’s a finely defined illusion of white cloth as the background)
JACK PIERSON, ‘Early Works and Beyond’, garnered an equally sensitive review by ROBERTA SMITH in the NEW YORK TIMES, of Friday, January 20, 2006. some of Roberta’s musings:
“This small survey show of Jack Pierson’s career …. also provides a useful account of Mr. Pierson’s consistently melancholic art, its siftings through the rubble of American life and its restless roaming through photography, sculpture, drawing and language. In both medium and message, Mr. Pierson’s work is about a kind of homelessness.
Mr. Pierson emerged in the early 1990’s in a generation that reacted to the slick self-confidence of late 1980’s Neo-Geo with a dilapidated disillusionment hastened by AIDS. His approach was both Romantic and hard-nosed; it favored bits of reality or language slightly rearranged. His best known works are poignant words spelled out in the plastic letters of old signs …….
For Mr. Pierson the inanimate world brims with longing and memory waiting to be coaxed forward ….”