Jack Pierson: Angel Youth

This publication--at once a daybook, a survey (it accompanies the artist's first exhibition in Ireland) and an artist's book--collects eight previous publications on the American artist Jack Pierson, several of which are long out of print. Pierson was among the first photographers to print pages with the imagery bleeding out of its usual white frame, and to deploy a bleached-out and overexposed style of photography that connotes a longing for a recent but already dimming past, littered with the props and players of yesterday's parties. By small increments, an emotional tone builds that is both warmly homoerotic and unabashedly wistful. All of these books were designed by the artist and are here reproduced in their original size and in chronological order. Jack Pierson makes photographs, word sculptures, installations, drawings and artist's books that excavate the emotional undercurrents of everyday life, from the intimacy of romantic attachment to the remote idolizing of the famous. Pierson has often engaged celebrity culture, refusing ironic treatment of the subject to instead confess, or seem to confess, his own attraction to the fantasy life depicted in his artworks. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Cheim & Read, New York; Alison Jacques Gallery, London and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. His work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.