I am still not sure how to classify this next artist’s work, as he produces photographs and paintings that form larger sculptures, which are put on display as massive installations. Armed with tape, yarn and his trusty airbrush, Daniel Tierney is a self taught tarot card reader, with a penchant for poker, and obvious knack for whatever we’re calling his work. If required to describe his work to a stranger Tierney says: “it’s something you didn’t know you already knew until you saw it: familiar and strange. It’s how you would tie your shoes if you melted your hands to a plastic truck. It’s where you would go if you could be everywhere at once. It’s a dark place where neon fires light the walls.” Confused? Don’t worry you’re not alone. Let’s delve a bit deeper into his mystical rabbit hole.
Tierney’s work depicts a confined visual space, which collapses and at times multiplies into a crystalline form. Space is not surreal or an illusion, a window or a mirror, but rather it’s more akin to a door though which similarities can be found to the meta/physical world. “His paintings and objects, within the shallow corridor of a few feet, attempt to dig an infinite space towards what real and imagined spaces present themselves to be in spite of, and created by, the messengers of history, media, and condition.” Tierney says that “a new piece isn’t attached to anything so it’s very special. It’s dirty. Incomplete. Rough in as many ways possible and more than likely it’s some sort of Frankenstein where the ideas that run through everything I make take a new form and sort of staggers into the woods. From there I just chase after it hurling chunks of butter and hope the fat kid takes the bait.”
