Jack Pierson, "onthisisland"

Pierson, who divides his time between New York and Joshua Tree, California, has worked in numerous mediums—photographs, collages, sculptures, installations and drawings—over the course of a 25-year career. He’s best known, perhaps, for elegant, homoerotic photographs of young male models as well as three-dimensional works made from found sign letters (stamped out of plastic or metal; sometimes lit up with neon or incandescent bulbs) forming words and phrases, such as “Hell,” “Faith” and “The World Is Yours.” Pierson’s is an art of desire, memory and loss, darkened by L.A. noir and unfulfilled Hollywood dreams, the last echoed by his forays here into the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing.