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M. JORDAN TIERNEY

The works that are featured in this catalog raisonne represent a time frame of approximately three years in M. Jordan Tierney's work. They were made during the last years spent in her studio in North West Washington D.C. before vacating it for a new studio in Baltimore, Maryland. Using blacks, ash whites and amber - a somewhat Lenten palette - they mirror some of the environmental and psychological influences that surround the artist in this period. These are certainly the colors that the inner city environment insinuates as a scrim over its delicate thrumming impatient wait for salvation. But they could as easily be the affecting colors of the current political era and its pervasive mood which insists a powerlessness and apprehension intimately for the city's - and more broadly the world's - care and preservation.

Jordan Tierney is principally a sculptor. When she works with flat planes, as she does in some of the multi-media panels included in this collection, it is not a consideration of painting. (Although in today's perspectives on interdisciplinary-format painting, some might classify these works that way.) The works however are very much about surface, dimensional intercourse and the manifestation of intellectual deceit through visual subterfuge. They are about deep space in near space, and they are about material and its metaphors.

The materials that the artist uses are from a specified vocabulary of several things. Aside from the laminated wood that provides a sturdy physical ground (and often maintains a circumstantial presence, rather than be fully obscured), she employs an inventory of old dress tissue patterns, textured wall paper with tin ceiling patterns, key tags, shards from porcelain serving ware, and a few old office supplies. All are selected for their ambiguous but gracious relationship to domestic enhancement. And here the term domestic might be thought of as extending from the homestead to the homeland.

In a primer of Tierney's glossary of terms, dress patterns offer a figurative human, largely feminine, presence - even when they are deconstructed into splaying spirals or orderly horizons - due to their originating shape and their product relationship to their intended fabricator. The dimensional wall paper is an architectural device. Victorian in design, but employed still for its superficial ability to parlay a deeply flawed surface into a finely graced one, it has a certain infamy to clean modern taste. When these two symbolically rich, but sidelined, miscellanea of ornamentation interact, anointed with an ephemeral phosphorescence of spray paint, an unanticipated Cinderella effect emerges from the materials. With Tierney's ash can color scheme the result is not a predictable aesthetic that one is accustomed to admiring and decorating around, and thus it is highly strange and supernatural, and in contrast to the elan the materials were manufactured for.

The Game Board works, which involve little smoke-printed key tags hooked provisionally on various pegs, further set up Tierney's theatre of anticipation. They propose a forfeiture of control, at least by half if not fully. For it must be assumed that at least one other hand gets a turn to make their move. The tournament rules too, may well be arbitrary and incomprehensible. Like the Magus, Tierney sets up predicaments, but remains an observer of chance. In the long range plan of her works, there are notorious darker tones to indicate toxicity: the carbon grey exhaust from smoke stacks, gun barrels, cigarettes, ill-tuned motors, or uncertainty - extinguishing candles and unfamiliar shadows.  In this series of works, too, are a satin white baptismal purity and a fallow, smoggy, acid-mustard to warm and nourish the grays. Symbolically, this brown yellow is a poultice sort of color, which is also to say it is both the color of restorative teas and the sulpherous soil such as sometimes seeps from the mouth of mountain springs.

Deborah McLeod

March 2004

"Release"
20 x 16"
gouache over collage,2004