November 19, 2009 | 2:00 PM
Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre | ACAD
Sponsored by the ACAD Drawing Program.
Screening of "The Mother Project" followed by Q+A with Tierney Gearon
Novermber 19, 2009 | 2:00 PM
Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre | ACAD
www.tierneygearon.com
www.themotherproject.com
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, self-taught photographer, Tierney Gearon, worked as a commercial photographer based in London for years before putting down her camera to become a mother.
While dealing with a failing marriage, she decided to pick up her camera again, this time to document her family. Tierney traveled around the world with her two children visiting relatives and photographing these experiences using numerous different cameras. She would use color film, black and white film, Polaroid, 35mm, medium format, and large format. She was letting life happen and capturing it in a very intimate way. Tierney describes her work as a diary of her soul.
These personal photos of her children and family were taken without any real intention of sharing them with an audience. Ultimately, Tierney’s personal photos were brought to the attention of art collector Charles Saatchi who featured her work in the “I Am a Camera” group exhibition alongside works by Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham and other established documentary-style photographers.
Tierney was virtually unknown when her photographs were first shown in 2001. Her intimate, groundbreaking portraits of her two children, what she calls the genesis of her “family series,” were a window into Tierney’s family life – spare, revealing, mordantly funny. But what the media and public seemed to care most about were her children’s state of undress. Critics of the work and visitors to the gallery were deeply divided. Major papers in London published Tierney’s photos in their pages in support of the artist and her work. Later that year the Gagosian Gallery showed a solo exhibition of the controversial images in New York.
After having her life invaded by the media and pregnant with her third child, Tierney moved away from the public eye of London to Los Angeles. Tierney once again returned to the work that put her on the map – the intimate, personal photos of her family. This time, turning her lens on her mother who lives alone in a small town in upstate New York.
Their relationship is complicated – her mother has suffered from mental illness for much of her adult life. Through the process of making these photographs, Tierney has struggled to understand how her mother lives now, as well as coming to grips with how her illness affected Tierney as a young girl. By extension, the process of taking the photographs also reflects Tierney’s struggle to be a good parent to her own children. Tierney describes her pictures as a form of therapy – a means of healing herself. These raw, intimate images she refers to as self-portraits, celebrate her mother and her free spirit.
Tierney showed this intense body of work titled “The Mother Project” in a solo exhibition with the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York in 2006, followed by the book “Daddy, where are you?” published by Steidl in 2007.
Early that year Tierney was asked to produce a body of work to show with Phillips de Pury and Company, after being introduced to Simon de Pury. She had been working with the idea of double exposed images, taking her photography to a new level. At this point her life was an explosion of mother of four kids with three different dads, her commercial work, her personal work and its controversial weight. Tierney began to double expose her film in camera, creating the element of chance and excitement to her work again; adding multiple layers to these images that mirror her own life, and express the inner workings of her own soul. “Explosure” was recently exhibited to critical acclaim in London at Philips de Pury and in Los Angeles at Ace Gallery.
