Daniel Tierney: Predator and the Eternal Return

Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Grove St. Window Installation Site. January - March 2007

Predator and the Eternal Return is a site-specific work by Daniel Tierney that uses screen shots from the Predator film as a starting point to explore the schizophrenic nature of attempting to represent the expansive notion of one landscape's possibility for infinite variability in space. The landscape in this case is fear made solid through the sculptural formations of paintings on paper. The paintings are made from moments in the film that Tierney describes as "Predator vision," a dimensionally flattened vision of space resembling infrared. His sculptural interest is in a concept of horizontal organization that extends infinitely in all directions, a place outside of time where nothing is hidden, ...a landscape of many landscapes. His fascination with the Predator character centers on its ability and drive to create its own enemy, allow it to grow and then return to fight it. In essence, the Predator is an existential self-actualized suicide killer.

Tierney's theoretical musings about the flexibility of space manifests in works of art that contain layer upon layer of transformed imagery. His process includes, but is not limited to:

-Capturing digital landscapes depicting 3d space in a 2d environment.

-Building sculpture out of large-scale paintings on paper of these landscapes.

-Creating new landscapes with the sculpture.

-Photographing the sculptural landscapes and returning them to a 2d format.

Tierney ultimately builds environments out of all of the remnants of this complicated process, which results in a synthesis of lush materials (photographs, prints, paper, tape, paint, wood…) representing deconstructed and reconstructed space.