Since 1995, Patrick Tierney, 3rd generation Californian has done hundreds of wall mounted and freestanding collage sculptures that address consumer desire through packaging. As an oeuvre, the work utilizes one hundred years or so of product packaging and consumerist ephemera to offer the vantage point of a naïve obsessive collector who has imbued his own hermetic revelations, a kind of post object criticism.
The sculptures concentrate on the seductiveness of packing forms and disavow the object that was for sale in the package. A sculpture is typically fashioned out of deconstructed product packaging and fragments of detritus, all of which are hot glued and or stapled in a loose “pseudo naïve” bricolage.
The artistic vision is simultaneously both, nostalgically reverent and post-modern ironic, making for a dynamic tension that confuses an audience in forming an exact response.
Tierney’s work forms a complex anti-aesthetic that pokes and jabs at fine art reification and the hobbyist decorative art forms. The work plays with the hidden seductive signifiers in consumer forms and wreaks havoc with them by playing an obdurate jazz improvisation on them. — Eric Saks, Filmmaker/Writer
Selected Exhibitions:
Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum, New York, The MOCA Museum, Los Angeles, The LACMA Museum, Los Angeles, The UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, recipient of several Southern California regional grants, and a subject of a retrospective at the REDCAT Theater, Spring 2004.
Patrick Tierney Image Gallery
