2 March – 20 April 2013

Jack Pierson experiments with the wealth of mental associations triggered through his sculptures made of found commercial signage. In Ennui (La Vie Continue), Pierson took on the important questions besetting Western culture.

The sculpture THESE ETERNAL QUESTIONS confronted the visitor with the founding mechanisms of Greek philosophy. Questioning the eternal questions is particularly relevant insofar as there is nothing intrinsically eternal about them – at some point, those questions must inevitably have been asked for the first time. The artist involved the viewers with the beginnings of thought and human awareness.

Pierson continued on with HIS QUIET WATERS, a direct reference to the biblical text the 23rd Psalm: "He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters”. He thus referenced that other great source of knowledge in western culture, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Where the Greek philosophical tradition perhaps asks more questions than it answers, the bible, which is traditionally considered to be the word of God, constitutes a set of guidelines for humanity.

With short, sharp, sometimes blunt sayings and proverbs, Pierson raised existential as well as poetic and political questions. He pondered over the principle of narrative so that the exhibition offers a quintessentially cathartic experience in the manner of a film script. In installing the works in the gallery space, Pierson reconstructed the script for the several-thousand-year history of human prevarication in its search for the meaning of existence. And in so doing, affirms the narrative power of the exhibition.

The parallel with the universe of film continues in the major work in the exhibition. The main gallery space is dominated by the gigantic DREAM installation. It is both a demonstration of the power of the imagination and a homage to the major role played by dreams in intellectual constructs and the answers that can sometimes be obtained from them.