First Pierson

Jack Pierson, who was born near Plymouth Rock in 1960 and worships Joan Didion, Joe Dallesandro, and Johnnie Ray ("the missel ing link between Sinatra and Elvis"), is the all-American artist of the 90s. Post-Beat, post-camp, post-Pop, post-conceptual, his highly praised and seemingly offhand art blends photography, sculpture, and poetry, nostalgic longing and nonchalant sexuality.

This month, PowerHouse Books and Thea Westreich will publish Pierson's All of a Sudden, a personal photographic trav⅜⅝. ⅛¶ elogue through Provincetown, Hollywood, Miami, and Manhattan in which everything—pools, palms, flowers, feet, painters' tables, seedy hotel rooms, naked guys, and nude lightbulbs—is suffused in an overexposed, blurry, dreamlike haze of tropical color and laid out in full-bleed, double-page, unadorned splendor.

"This book is about the search for glamour and the romantic artist's life and the need I have to let you know that I know what beauty is," explains Pierson in his Times Square studio while he plays with "word pieces"— letters from old commercial signs spelling out such things as "Little Eva" and "Stay"—for his next show, at New York's Luhring-Augustine Gallery this spring. Pierson's work is currently on view at the Texas Gallery in Houston and Galerie Aurel Scheibler in Cologne.

B.C.