Michael Salvatore Tierney

Michael Salvatore Tierney

Michael Salvatore Tierney explores the experience of space, the memory of place and the emotional impact that transforms our mundane environment into a complex cerebral and spiritual universe. His work focuses on architecture and urban landscapes, engaging a symbiotic relationship between painting and photography and a poetic meditation on the line between abstraction and representation. Contrary to its highly restrained and formal presentation, the work is ultimately an allegorical dimension infused with the wonder of visual creation and the ways in which we interpret and understand our environment.

Largely influenced by the California Light and Space movement of the 1960s, Tierney’s minimalist compositions creep toward an intense burn, impacting the viewer physically through the ethereal use of light. His digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of painting and sculpture, creating fiction rather than documentation. Embracing difficult and tedious techniques, he uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements that paradoxically "feel" visually right, though they are factually wrong.

Michael Salvatore Tierney was born in 1968 in New York. In 2009, he gained unprecedented access to photograph NASA facilities for purely artistic purposes. He unveiled his Aerospace exhibition at Blythe Projects in January 2010 as both a deeply personal and cultural exploration of the fascination and apprehension behind the aerospace industry and the symbolic significance we invest in it. His works have been exhibited in Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago and are found in both corporate and private collections across the United States.