Colors, textures set photographer Tierney Gearon alight

Los Angeles Times Style Profile
By Monica Corcoran, Feb 22, 2009

The Santa Monica artist, on exhibit at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills, travels the world and calls her personal style ‘bohemian elegant.’

Stefano Paltera / For The Times
MAKING A SPLASH: Tierney Gearon stretches out in her Santa Monica home atop images featured in the exhibit “Explosure.” She says she uses “free-style directing.”

In her first West Coast show, “Explosure,” photographer Tierney Gearon is a loving matchmaker of moments. But bringing together compatible images would make for a dull marriage, so she conjoins the unlikeliest of pairs through double exposure. Little girls dancing are superimposed on a background of brown bears from a museum diorama. A woman holds a white peacock, the field where she stands dissolving into the ripples of a beach. Imagine a collision of landscapes and cultures that develops into a warm embrace.

“These pictures are a celebration of a world that is crashing and blossoming at the same time,” says Gearon, whose chic opening dinner party last week at Ace Gallery was considered the “it” art party of Oscar week by default. (Art dealer Larry Gagosian didn’t host his annual high-profile art exhibition and supper at Mr. Chow this year.) Gearon’s previous work debuted in 2001 at the Saatchi Gallery in London, and a 2006 documentary, “The Mother Project,” sprang from an exhibition that explores her mom’s mental illness. Gearon lives with her four children in a rambling Spanish-style house in Santa Monica and often photographs her family in her own backyard.