At first, Jack Pierson's photos, drawings, sculptures and installations appear to be part of a quest for beauty, a beauty synonymous with sensual and visual pleasure, the by-product of an intensely hedonistic lifestyle. His colorful photographs, large photo-derived paintings and collages often show tropical vegetation, handsome young men lounging around in the sun in various states of undress, or the cozy interiors of hotel rooms by the sea. The objects he chooses for his installations--items rescued from his former apartments, such as chairs, a desk, books, records, sheets, towels and cigarette lighters--are slice-of-life relics from an artist's downtime rather than from the realm of work. And his found-lettering sculptures evoke the seductive immediacy of advertising display but have little to do with disseminating information.

The more acerbic edge of Pierson's ostensibly romantic vision was plainly evidenced by a large-scale museum survey, the artist's first in the U.S., which appeared last spring at North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Titled "Regrets," the exhibition contained more than 50 pieces from the period 1990 to 2001, assembled by museum director Bonnie Clearwater. It revealed a restless artist whose work is multifarious in terms of materials, technique, imagery and thematic concerns. Excluded from the show were some of Pierson's more explicit homo-erotic images and word pieces with drug references. However, much of the exhibition (including a number of well-known photos and text works, rarely exhibited neon sculptures, a video installation and two mural-sized, site-specific wall drawings) touched upon identity issues of social alienation and youthful rebellion. Despite the glitter, gloss and humor, a feeling of melancholy and angst unexpectedly seeped into the mix.

For example, displayed in one of the first galleries, a large 1993 photo, Untitled (Chris) shows a full-frontal nude male standing in a hallway; the slightly shadowy figure appears somewhat distant and aloof, like a partner in a one-night stand rather than an intimate relationship. On the floor near the photo, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Part II (1990), a sculpture made of 120 bars of yellow soap neatly arranged in a 53-by-25-inch rectangle, was similarly equivocal. Each bar is carefully etched with the first name of a man whom the artist presumably has known--such as Joe, Mark and Jimmy--along with a brief description: preppy guy, butch, French guy, etc. While the work puns on Minimalist sculpture by Carl Andre, it also serves as an emblem of cleanliness in the age of AIDS, as well as conjuring a bawdy locker-room joke about gay guys bending over in the shower to pick up a bar of soap.

Melancholy bleeds into nostalgia in Untitled Self Portrait (James Dean), 1991, a large collage-on-canvas work covered with photos of the star clipped from magazines, which looks like the altarpiece of an obsessed fan. One can imagine the star-struck artist lovingly pasting these clippings together on the shabby desk featured in Diamond Life (1990), a tableau that includes a chair, an old stereo system with a diamond stylus for playing vinyl records (it played the Rolling Stones LP Let It Bleed during the show's opening), a stack of LPs leaning against the desk and a Miami Beach postcard pinned to a yellow-painted wall. The work owes something to Daniel Spoerri's "snare pictures," three-dimensional still lifes made of found objects, and to works by other Nouveau Realiste artists of the 1960s. Most of the elements Pierson used in Diamond Life were salvaged from the tiny, $56-per-week Miami home and studio that he occupied in the mid-1980s.

Born in Plymouth, Mass., in 1960, Pierson moved to south Florida after finishing his studies at Boston's College of Art in 1984. Initially attracted to the area's seedy glamour (predating Miami's '90s "renaissance"), he eventually returned north, settling in New York City and Provincetown by the late '80s.

In New York, he produced photos and installations in which he explored notions of celebrity and the Hollywood star system, using his friends and himself as models. Among the striking photos from that period are The Call Back (1990), showing a smiling drag queen dolled up to look like Lucille Ball (presumably she's on her way to visit a casting director), and The Lonely Life (1992), an overexposed image of a leggy chorus line poised just as the curtain rises on a Broadway musical.

During this time, Pierson began exhibiting frequently in group shows with Boston friends and colleagues such as Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, David Armstrong and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Unlike those photographer-artists, however, Pierson gave equal attention to 3-D works and drawing. Turning Warhol's preoccupation with stars into an examination of the "art star," Pierson explored the role of the artist as a cult figure. He pays homage to Warhol in Silver Jackie with Blue Spotlight (1991), one of the show's flashier installations. A small stage trimmed in white Christmas lights is outfitted with a floor-to-ceiling curtain made of long strands of silver Mylar. One blue spotlight illuminates the scene, as if a performer is just about to step out from behind the curtain or has just left the stage. The setting suggests a glitzy showcase in a tacky strip club; it also conveys a sense of absence and loss, not unlike the contemporaneous light-string pieces by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Pierson's own blend of tabloid and tragedy is in keeping with the tone of Warhol's vivid yet sorrowful images of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Pierson's scrawled-letter drawings in ink and graphite, sometimes accompanied by expressionist renderings of faces, hands and objects, recall works of concrete poetry. In Hope Dreams You (1991), he crudely hand-printed and then canceled each of those words with a stark X, in an anguish-filled comment on lost love. More woes are conveyed in Hard Times on 8th Avenue (1992), in which "Say Goodbye to Hollywood," the title of a 1981 Billy Joel song, written in cursive script at the top of the page, appears like a caption above relatively delicate renderings of a coffee cup, smoldering cigarette butts in an ashtray and a long-stemmed rose.

The sign-letter sculptures, more visually aggressive than the drawings, achieve a similar emotional resonance. Scavenging the junkyards, Pierson retrieved fragments of signage in plastic, wood, metal or neon, fixing the letters to the wall. The works explore the relationship between art and language in a way that superficially recalls earlier experiments by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and Bruce Nauman, although Pierson's concerns are rather far removed from language theory. The impact of his work has more to do with the tactile properties of individual letters and snappy phrases, which sing with the Pop immediacy found in works by Ed Ruscha or Robert Indiana.

Pierson's first found-letter piece, Scarface (1991), refers to the Al Pacino movie about Miami cocaine dealers, which has long obsessed the artist. Arranged in rows within an approximately 7-foot-square area, the colorful letters, most about a foot or two high, do not form words. The artist was more concerned with establishing a sense of rhythm in terms of the shapes and colors of the lettering. In the Miami show, a mural-sized wall drawing of a head accompanied Scarface. Slashing black lines designating a face with its eyes closed hint at a portrait of Pacino.

Most of his found letters, however, do form words or short phrases. The material, color, size and placement of each letter are crucial to a work's overall effect. Some pieces are stark and to the point, such as Stay (1991), which emphatically spells the word with sleek silver and white Deco-like letters. Blue (1993) is an emblematic work made of blocky letters in various shades of cobalt and ultramarine, while the letters in Beauty (1995) are all in sumptuous shades of red. Hung unevenly along the wall, the topsy-turvy letters spelling Water (2000) decline toward the floor in a symbolic cascade. One of the most eye-catching signage pieces is Paradise Lights (1996) a large-scale work made of flashing letters that appear to have been discarded by some Las Vegas casino. Permanently installed outdoors on the side of MOCA, Paradise's wildly blinking lights illuminate the courtyard at night.