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M. JORDAN TIERNEY
To walk into Jordan
Tierney’s studio is to enter the land of poetic salvage.
Weathered barbed wire in coils hangs on windows. Skeletons, animal
and other, are jarred, bottled, sorted in drawers. Shelved boxes
read: tuning pins, pulleys, washers. Foot-high stacks of dismantled
pianos wait against walls and under tables. Lately, the air smells
as if something is on fire.
Tierney, born in New York, now lives within view of the U.S.
Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. She inhabits a loft of the unfinished
variety in a former canning factory in an inner city neighborhood.
A master draftsman and painter, Tierney turned to large scale
assemblage five years ago. Her virtuosity now extends to carpentry,
soldering, carving, and a variety of construction proficiencies.
She is a seasoned denizen of hardware stores, lumber mills, flea
markets, train tracks, rooftops, waterways, gullies and alleys.
Tierney is unafraid of any material. That confidence is married
to a searching and delicate intelligence. I come to this studio
over and over because the work sustains, and never cheapens or
sentimentalizes. I have, under this work’s tutelage, expected
and loved more of art, and better understood the hidden structure
of the world’s seeming random. Some of the larger works
feel as if they are some kind of apparatus designed to make sense
of existence. Others feel as if they are visual constructions
left as records of invisible transformations.
They also function as beautiful objects, even as they are mysterious
machines. There is rarely a place in an assemblage or collage
that is not crafted, worked, considered into a visual lushness.
In a collage titled Mathilda’s I, tissues of home sewing
patterns are crumpled into veils of caramel light. Those effulgent
flutterings, containing navy colored lines accompanied by words
such as “cut here” or “pinafore,” are minutely
pleated in patterns reminiscent of trembling water.
In an assemblage titled Augural Shadows, a resin-drenched clotting
of fabrics appears behind a small window. It has compositional
balance. It has discoveries of color-an almost tawny honey and
not quite Bordeaux wine. On its own, this window would be enough
to keep the eye blissfully busy. But it is part of a large work
in which many such visual feasts are embedded. The whole, seen
from afar, moves. A human-sized figure burned in wood wavers
in and out of focus behind a grid of wood, into which are bolted
pint liquor bottles carrying paper doll costumes from ancient
Rome to Jackie Kennedy pillbox. The gridded figure rests on an
old steamer trunk into which the window of sodden lace and linen
has been cut.
Lately, the smell of fire in the studio has come from a technique
Tierney has explored involving the carving, burning and sandblasting
of wood into images, usually of the human figure. Unlike paint,
which rests on the surface, this interference with surface becomes
the surface. The figure is thus organic and one with the material.
Tierney’s interest in this technique has its roots in seminal
images from her generation. The afterimages of human gesture
embossed into buildings after Hiroshima are one source. The Star
Trek transporter room sparkles that depicted the atoms of the
human body are another.
The work that gets made here has some relationship, however distant
and transformed, to the found object discoveries pioneered by
Duchamp. But there is no Duchampian critique of the art world’s
pretensions, and his descendants’ preoccupations are far
from Tierney’s. Unlike most who have appropriated found
objects, (Rauschenberg, Johns, Kienholz) Tierney incorporates
them not for ironic or political purposes, but for the sensuousness
they possess. She effectively extends the transcendent claims
usually reserved for painting to assemblage. Part of this is
because of her lyrical manipulation of the found object’s
surface. Her debt to Cornell, perhaps, is the greatest. There
is a magical sensibility they share-and Tierney is a great student
of his practice and preoccupations, perusing his dossiers and
boxes of found compasses, marbles, matchboxes, clay pipes, owl
cutouts and the like at the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the
National Museum of American Art.
She has developed a “Lilliputian Filing System” for
the one inch squares of paper that become her collage. The fragments
fit in a wooden suitcase ready for travel. Compartments are titled:
Faces, night sky, maroon, and lace. It serves as a memory bank,
storing input from images circulating in the tide of paper we
wade in. Each square is a jewel-like chunk of our reality.
Tierney is an ardent reader. A lover of ideas, her living quarters
are paneled in bookshelves. She is conversant on physics, history,
poetry, meteorology, religion, archeology, philosophy. She questions
her cherished assumptions. She accepts nothing as necessary.
When I walk into her studio, I am never sure what avenue she
will have rejected in her work, and which trajectory she may
be beginning. Because Tierney is also an artist for whom making
art is an unalloyed element of her psychology and chemistry,
she produces passionately. The works in this catalogue are a
sample of that abundance and a fitting introduction to her formidable
talent.
COLLAGE
Time has always
been an element in my work. Every city is constantly revealing
its age. Vienna whispers much more history than Washington, D.C.,
my home. Shadows are everywhere. Then there are the same daily
barrages of junk mail advertisements for things you can’t
take with you. Instants and eons. Theatre posters pile up, plaster
chips away, names erode off gravestones, stains put strange expressions
on heroes. My surfaces have become an accumulation of these textural
events. By eliciting the past, including the present, and opening
a window to the future in each piece, I suggest eternity within
a centimeter of surface.
— Tierney on her Austrian residency
In collage, Tierney makes sumptuous that which is stained, eroded and lost. She achieves this transformation with a stunning paucity of materials. In Grand Scheme of Things, deep blue paper, punched with a pencil, is enough to make stars. Under these minimal heavens, thinning plaster on cardboard reveals a tendril grid of wire, frayed and rusting. In Public Record, pieces of lead tied in string hang from bone white clothespins. In Facade, bandage gauze and squares of newsprint render into ghosts. In Class of 1938, squares of news type, stained black and partially torn make an abstracted alphabet of gesture. Tierney completed these works on paper as an Artist in Residence through the Austrian Federal Chancellery in Vienna in late 2000. Tierney has always been a master of collage, but this work marks an important re-seeing of its possibilities. The Vienna residency confronted her with the limitations of working in an improvised studio space for a period of time too short to merit a full-scale move. Tierney’s assemblage remained in her Washington loft and studio. That interesting deprivation, combined with the rich historical palimpsest of Vienna, has resulted in a deepening of Tierney’s ingenuity and vision. Almost all the collages from Tierney’s Vienna residency are 12'’ by 18.’’ Except for Written in Stone, they adhere to the grid, a device throughout Tierney’s work that she uses both to organize and to fragment. In most of these collages, the grid is composed of one inch squares of a variety of items—sewing pattern tissue, gauze, paper doilies, newspaper and magazine snippets. But all have been altered, mostly by coloring or rubbing, into burnished arrays. Taken together they signal a new austerity in Tierney’s work.
ASSEMBLAGE
‘It was only after the conclusion, after everything was
over, that the sense of reality returned, long after, in fact,
when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and
put them together to see the pattern. This is not remarkable,
for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event,
but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.
We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event,
which is not real in itself, arises from other events which,
likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what
we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize
this do we live, for our own identity is dependent on this principle.’
— from All the Kings Men by
Robert Penn Warren
Tierney’s new
assemblages are simplified and intensified. Potent Potions is
almost sanitary in appearance. Dark brown pint liquor bottles
similar to Augural Shadows’ clear pint bottles are now devoid
of paper dolls or handsome copper bolting. There are also only
nine of them, and they now float serenely in a white grid that
has been purified into a single shelf.
In works such as Alpha Omega and Faith, Tierney has distilled
her earliest explorations of the human figure. The austere figure
of Alpha Omega curls fetally in elegantly burnt and sanded wood.
In Faith, a spectral figure emerges out of a grid of black charred
wood. Attached by string to the figure’s heart is a brass
plumb bob shaped like an arrow, suggesting the needle of a compass.
In Essence, a carved figure’s torso and a cabbage shredder
are integrated into a polished totemic apparatus. A fishing weight
is its center and a rectangular box with a slit at the top, suitable
for religious offerings collects its past.
But the most ambitious and alluring of Tierney’s recent
assemblage is Emprise. The title is a noun, now archaic, that
meant an undertaking; an enterprise, or prowess; daring. Indeed
the execution of this 103 x 72" piece required prowess and
daring from its creator. The topmost portion is a “collage”
of thousands of wooden creating a night sky. But it is a dynamic
darkness: some dominoes push outward by several layers, others
lie in domino valleys. Tierney pulled a female figure out of
this variegated crust. In so doing, the surfaces of the dominoes
have been transformed into countless miracles of texture. The
temptation to touch is great. Standing before this variety, one
realizes how we take so little time to see, really see, anything.
The figure is a dauntless creature, facing into the wind, one
hand on her chest, the other feathering the wind behind, her
hair streaming. Her waist and hips elide into the lower half
of the assemblage, which is comprised of a single bedspring,
beneath which lace, fishing net buoys, and ivory-stripped piano
keys fan as if to make a dress from a shipwreck. This is a creation
of immense strength and beauty.
— Lorraine Adams
Washington, D.C., March 2001
"Fraglie"
12 x 9"
gouache over collage,1996
collection of Grace Taylor