BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8 x 9.5 in. / 104 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 11/21/2017 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 49
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788862085625TRADE List Price: $40.00 CDN $54.00
AVAILABILITY In stock
TERRITORY NA LA
Authenticity is what Jack Pierson’s pictures convey. They have the feel of raw experience: the taste of a place, the face of a friend, a dismal aspect, a flash of passion. At the same time, they relish the medium of photography, its epiphanies, and its flaws. Jack disrespects the merely good for the sake of the expressionistically real. - STEPHEN SHORE
The '80s photographs of Boston School veteran Jack Pierson are at once melancholy and joyous, erotic and slyly witty
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Jack Pierson (born 1960) is a photographer associated with " The Boston School" - group of young photographers who moved to NYC in late 1970s and worked on fringes (Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mark Morrisroe.) He divides his time between his home and studio in the Southern California desert near Joshua Tree National Park and New York.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Lush pastel hazy landscapes, florals and portraits of young sensual men- sophisticated riff on 70s sunset posters. Tipped on image on cover.
PROMO & PRESS: Expect coverage in photo and fashion magazines likeNew York Times T Magazine, Photograph. These works the subject of exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum Feb - May 21 2017;OMG a sculpture by Pierson was just installed at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eileen Myles (born 1949) is an American poet and writer. Seminal books include: Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow Press, 1994) I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014.(New York: Ecco Press, 2015) The Importance of Being Iceland(Semiotext(e), 2009). She is partners with Jill Soloway , the creator of Transparent.
QUOTE:" Your work is notebook-y, it's sun-drenched, it's nostalgic, it's tossed-off, it's working-class beach, it's pop, it's lonesome, it's tinted." Eileen Myles
Introduction by Eileen Myles. Foreword by Stephen Shore.
The ’80s photographs of Boston School veteran Jack Pierson are at once melancholy and joyous, erotic and slyly witty
The Hungry Years collects the early photographs of Jack Pierson, taken throughout the 1980s—photographs that have increasingly captured the attention of the art world since they were first editioned in 1990.
Informed in part by his artistic emergence in the era of AIDS, Pierson’s work is moored by melancholy and introspection, yet his images are often buoyed by a celebratory aura of homoeroticism, seduction and glamour. Sometimes infused with a sly sense of humor, Pierson’s work is inherently autobiographical; often using his friends as his models and referencing traditional Americana motifs, his bright yet distanced imagery reveals the undercurrents of the uncanny in the quotidian.
Fueled by the poignancy of emotional experience and by the sensations of memory, obsession and absence, Pierson’s subject is ultimately, as he states, “hope.”
For more than two decades, New York–based artist Jack Pierson (born 1960) has been using the visual languages of photography, painting, sculpture and drawing to examine intimate and emotional aspects of everyday life. Gaining recognition alongside a group of photographers known as the Boston School, Pierson explores the cultural construction of identity, including how we see and how others see us. Pierson has had numerous recent solo exhibitions and his work is 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, among other museums worldwide.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Jack Pierson: The Hungry Years.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Bookforum
Michael Miller
...characters exude a distincitive pleasure at being in the world, whether they're lounging in seedy hotel rooms or hanging at the beach.. his characters also burst with character, swagger, and humor.
Gayletter
it’s important to note that The Hungry Years is not a representative portfolio; rather it’s a collection of work from a specific point in Pierson’s life and art.
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FROM THE BOOK
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY EILEEN MYLES
Last year we were in my apartment and Jack was talking about going on a trip to Florida in the 80s and I’m of course thinking that Florida means something particular to someone (like Jack) who is from New England because New England sadly has about as much past as America has got – it’s branded by that New and of course New England is anything but new. Really it just wants to be old and it isn’t so you see those of us from New England just traveling around the world, shaking off those chains of the sharp quickening weather and that sad desire to be classy or old usually betrayed by our quaint speech – wicked or our loafers, or deliberately well-worn clothes in New England’s endless imitation of “real” which is a copy of those who we think know about something older – we think they own stuff, Harvard and the Swan Boats and that Swan Boat accident and all that cold weather food. So when this person goes south and not because he’s training for the Red Sox and not old but maybe he’s running away from something, hitching a ride on somebody else’s vacation, their buddy’s family owns something down there, maybe a deal of some kind is going on, or their parent’s place on the beach is empty for a while anyhow they go. According to Jack he took some pictures in response to I’m guessing the lightness, the eeriness of the bright buildings and the palms and the Florida tendency to be another America, professing to be new not old and failing at it. And explaining himself about that first burst he took he said “and I kept using the camera there.” I love that there. What is that. Not Florida. But some new world you’re in. What if you got knocked out of your world for this reason or that. You’re kind of in between. You look around and you think this place is good. Not Florida but the world. Shit happens so fast. They’re going to pick up a couple of guys for a purpose, Leo’s friends and the guys’ bags are packed and they’re standing under a telephone pole like it’s a mast. Everything looks like a movie in a way in this already in-between world of Jack’s. The white buildings surrounding the little men accidentally their white shirts and the blue creeping up or falling down and there’s also a lot of ground. What’s important is the anticipated meeting with the two but it hasn’t happened yet and it looks Pasolini somehow but I’m not going to bother with that. If the world is a film and I don’t have to stage it but I decided to keep using the camera there... - Christmas, 2016
"Janet and Lynelle" (1990) is reproduced from Jack Pierson: The Hungry Years,Damiani’s new collection of Pierson’s sometimes erotic, sometimes funny, yearning or enigmatic early photographs. In her introduction, a work of art in its own right, Eileen Myles writes, “I love photography because it makes choices for you and the person or what you’re looking at makes some more and finally you are kind of what stops the action of the swirling world. I saw that, I ask that…” continue to blog
Featured images are reproduced from Jack Pierson: The Hungry Years, Damiani's ineffably eloquent recent collection of the artist's '80s photographs. “I don’t know who I am,” Eileen Myles writes in her Introduction. "We’re just passing through these frames, these arcades wandering through the world in our bodies. Sad animals. And we prefer certain bodies like we prefer certain woods. Animals have preferences. Everybody does. Preference is animation. Giving it a soul—time does it for a body or a rusted ceiling with so many of these bulbs missing and each leaves a small black hole. The tawdry side of life is celestial. The rich many not know that at all. They begin forgetting everything.” continue to blog
Dear Dave, SVA Theatre, Damiani and ARTBOOK | D.A.P. invite you to celebrate the publication of Jack Pierson: The Hungry Years with a conversation between
Pierson and Steel Stillman on Thursday, October 12, at 7PM. Book signing to follow. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 9.5 in. / 104 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $40.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $54 ISBN: 9788862085625 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 11/21/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Damiani. Introduction by Eileen Myles. Foreword by Stephen Shore.
The ’80s photographs of Boston School veteran Jack Pierson are at once melancholy and joyous, erotic and slyly witty
The Hungry Years collects the early photographs of Jack Pierson, taken throughout the 1980s—photographs that have increasingly captured the attention of the art world since they were first editioned in 1990.
Informed in part by his artistic emergence in the era of AIDS, Pierson’s work is moored by melancholy and introspection, yet his images are often buoyed by a celebratory aura of homoeroticism, seduction and glamour. Sometimes infused with a sly sense of humor, Pierson’s work is inherently autobiographical; often using his friends as his models and referencing traditional Americana motifs, his bright yet distanced imagery reveals the undercurrents of the uncanny in the quotidian.
Fueled by the poignancy of emotional experience and by the sensations of memory, obsession and absence, Pierson’s subject is ultimately, as he states, “hope.”
For more than two decades, New York–based artist Jack Pierson (born 1960) has been using the visual languages of photography, painting, sculpture and drawing to examine intimate and emotional aspects of everyday life. Gaining recognition alongside a group of photographers known as the Boston School, Pierson explores the cultural construction of identity, including how we see and how others see us. Pierson has had numerous recent solo exhibitions and his work is 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, among other museums worldwide.
