"Melancholia Passing into Madness.

"Melancholia Passing into Madness," the title of Jack Pierson's new show at Cheim & Read, is drawn (its pres release explains) from the caption of undivided of the many 19th-century medical photographs purporting to present to view the physiognomic expression of its subject's mental state. For Pierson, the title phrase helps as a leitmotif, joining remarkably different works that address themes the two of nostalgia and loss, and of romantic or melodramatic conceptions of the artistic sensibility.

In undivided room, the backward-looking theme is played on the outside in a video starring Ursula Hodel as a dominatrix narcissistically recounting to her submissive partner her past life as an Egyptian queen In another swing the word "melancholia" is incantationed out in various found epistles rescued from antiquated wood, metal and neon signs: inserted among the literal senses are detritus including candles and shells, suggesting an impromptu roadside memorial or shrine. Starting forward the wall and descending to the floor, this piece, from 2006 stretch outs a signature body of work that may have one time formed a raw. languid riposte to the highly finished, aggressive art of the 1980 and '90 further today risks suggesting the kind of folksiness also set in mass-marketed elements of abiding-place decor. Another assemblage suggesting a kind of longing, either for romance or for a time before a romance's completion is ROSES ROSES ROSES (2005) a composition spelling abroad the title in found alphabetic characters that are strewn on the floor as if waiting to be disposed of like dead flowers.

A series of large silkscreened images of a woman in three-quarter view, drawn in various undressed and casual ways, perhaps alludes to the 19th-century photograph invoked at the show's title. These images have a Warholian coolnes (the expose has a slight resemblance to Jackie Onassis) and a childish matter-of-factness, as if they were shapeless attempts at copying a face from a photograph. There is a camp undercurrent in these works' fascination with stardom and glamour. Indeed, single work in the show was a collection of vintage headshots of aspiring B-list actor-models. unless the attraction to celebrity appears retrospective, as if it were a pining for a period that is now closed

In another series of works with a starry-eyed elegiac tone, Pierson painstakingly copied gone out in pencil on paper the first printed page of main division s by such disparate female authors as Joan Didion. Marilyn Monroe Jean Rhy Barbara Pym and Sister Wendy. While the camp potential of a certain of the writers makes those works gently humorous, these drawings, remarkably detailed and to scale, nonetheless together put in mind of a kind of wistful yearning to intimately associate with famous women between the sides of making, by hand, objects that were originally sole mechanically produced. Like the base letters, the handwritten texts also insinuate a kind of ever-failing attempt to recuperate and restore what time has damaged or discarded.

...

Home