Jack Pierson

Jack Pierson’s latest exhibition is titled “Some Other Spring,” but a more apt descriptor might be “some other place.” The installation, composed of photographs, drawings, and sculptures, is a travelogue of images taken or drawn abroad that range from the generic to the highly personal. Empty beaches and Greek sculptures are shown alongside Cyclops (all works 2010), a portrait of Ryan McGinley with a camera obscuring his face, which is tacked to the wall next to a picture of pixelated blinds. Some of the photographs tend toward artsy Flickr fare, but that amateur view is precisely the mode that Pierson aims to critically invoke.

Public and private affects intermingle in the photographs’ production as enlarged pigment prints on textured watercolor paper. Having once been folded into neat squares, the prints bear gridded creases and are hung as if they were posters in a dorm room. The velvety texture of the paper emanates tactile warmth from afar but diffuses the images into tiny specks of pigment when seen up close. Pierson’s signature sculptures of words and his drawings generate a similar tension; the sculptures, created from discarded signage, punctuate the exhibition with oblique poetic announcements, such as A THOUSAND YEARS, while the drawings, clearly ripped from a pad, have the alternating delicacy and naïveté of a diaristic impression. The sensuality of pink pyramids and classical torsos is complicated by the melancholy of a gravestone or a pile of tomatoes fallen off the vine. Such subtly competing values characterize a subjectivity that has found expression in travel photography, turning a populist medium into a personal one.