back to bibliography
The Washington Post
Saturday, October 5, 1996
By Ferdinand Protzman
"No Dada's Girl"
Maureen Jordan Tierney was wandering
through the flea market on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown one
Sunday when she saw a piano keyboard for sale. The ivory was
badly worn and yellowed with age. Stripped from the instrument,
the keys seemed singularly useless, the sort of junk no one in
his right mind would buy, just musical detritus destined for
the dump.
Tierney, clearly a person in touch with the left side of her
brain, not only bought it but made it part of a remarkable piece
of art. "When I saw the keyboard, it immediately suggested
to me a giant structure for making choices," says Tierney,
a 33-year-old Washington-based artist whose new paintings and
assemblages are on display in a visually arresting and intellectually
stimulating exhibition at Touchstone Gallery. "I don't know
when I decided to connect the keys to fishing rods. That came
later. In painting, you have an idea, pick up a brush and make
a composition. With assemblages, the object comes first. It suggests
the idea and tells you what to do."
The paintings are impressive. The assemblages are stunning. The
result of Tierney's flea-market vision is "Casting Altarpiece",
a large, wall-mounted assemblage that combines the keyboard and
fishing tackle with mousetraps, buttons, bedsprings, collage
and mixed media additions. Somehow, these disparate parts come
together in what looks from a distance like a cross section between
a carnival game, a stained-glass window and a prototype personal
computer.
Which, in a sense it is, since the piece deals with themes that
recur in all of Tierney's work: the individual's struggle for
personal freedom and fulfillment in a mass society; the varying
and sometimes confusing levels on which human beings relate to
one another; the difference between appearance and reality; the
risk-filled search for love, sex, intimacy, security and spiritual
transcendence.
Much of the work contains elements of kinetic art- a term that
has been used to describe everything from 1960s-style "happenings"
to sculpture incorporating mechanical devices. Some of Tierney's
assemblages, such as "Pedanticus", a stickling Yankee
grammarian made from table legs, a clock, an hourglass and piano
works, have feet and look to be on the verge of ambulation. And
it is almost impossible to look at the assemblages without thinking
of Marcel Duchamp, the French artist and art theorist and leader
of the dada movement. In 1913, Duchamp invented what he called
"the ready-made" by mounting a bicycle wheel on a kitchen
stool. He later displayed a bottle rack purchased in a store
and a urinal, which he titled "Fountain" and signed
R. Mutt.
But Tierney is not a letter-day Dadaist. Duchamp was trying to
show that life is absurd, meaningless and without aesthetic values.
Tierney's "Icarus Cycle", a twelve-panel painting that
was displayed twice last year in the middle of Dupont Circle
as well as at Borders Books & Music on L Street, effectively
summarized her view of life as a cyclical struggle to find meaning
through personal growth and renewal.
"One of the reasons I create complex structures is to mirror
the complexity of life, the choices we have to make and the risks
we take in just trying to get to know someone," Tierney
says.
"Casting
Altarpiece"
104 x 38 x 5"
wood construction, piano parts, bedspring,
fishing tackle, buttons, resin, collage, paint
1996