Tierney Gearon at Phillips de Pury

Tierney Gearon at Phillips de Pury

13 January, 2009
by: Katuschka

London exhibitions

Double exposure photography, once the mainstay of ghostly hoaxes, seems to be getting a lot of press recently. Perhaps it's the MySpace scourge of blurry, digital photography clogging up the internet like a smoker's arteries, or the growing ease with which 'art' photography can be produced which has inspired artists to gimmick-up the medium.

Whatever the case, the gauzy, dreamlike visuals produced by exposing layers of film infuses reality with the brand of David LaChapelle otherness which generally requires oodles of Photoshop and inches photography ever closer to its painted contemporaries.

As with any artistic medium there are those who wield their film tanks like mighty Excaliburs, and those who don't know their dark room from their elbow. It's a neat trick to achieve a finished product where the two images have been fused into more than the sum of their parts. Thankfully, controversial photographer Tierney Gearon seems to have mastered the medium to near perfection.

Gearon was first encouraged by a friend to use double exposures to take the focus off her own body (let's just say she has a penchant for public nudity). And in Explosure, her current exhibition at Phillips de Pury, (and potential title for Jason Statham's next film) she builds on her unique and astonishing body of work - unscathed by the spurious 'child pornography' accusations that surrounded her I Am a Camera show at the Saatchi Gallery.

There's a huge amount of work in this show. Each picture is a barrage of considered imagery, focusing largely on dichotomies to keep the images balanced. A beach merges into a snowy hillside; day turns to night on either side of a forest; young and old, privileged and disenfranchised are juxtaposed like ships in the night. Images are thickly clustered, and distorted to the point of abstraction. The ease with which they come together is unsettling yet fateful, and highly impressive when you consider that none are digitally altered.

Gearon's eye for perspective, composition, and the photographic moment makes her work comprehensive, accessible and beautiful. Gearon has implemented tropes of surrealist art from the fabric of the everyday: there are explosions of colour, from LA sunshine to burgeoning, mid-western storm clouds; oil-painting texture created by superimposing stucco walls over planes of colour; pictures of her daughters who seem to pop out of the frame; and intertwined lovers whose bodies mirror the backdrop of bare mountains.

Gearon's work is intensely personal. She appears to view life through a constant aperture, documenting her travels, nude photos of her family (including her bipolar mother), her home in LA, and her work as a fashion photographer. She does little to dispel the stereotype of the louche, bohemian artist, but this lack of vulnerability and bold exposure is what makes her work so exciting. Nude pictures of her young children (which previously caused her to be questioned by police when a patron puritanically deemed them exploitative) are again present in what seems to be a middle finger to her critics.

The exhibition in general seems to have been consolidated by Gearon's wish to expand her thematic boundaries. Whatever truth Gearon is trying to unveil by shrouding it in layers of mystery, it looks damn good, and lays the groundwork for undoubtedly better things to come.  

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