[caption id="attachment_69614" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="A scene featuring Mexican wrestlers in “Lucha Libre,” a film by Moira Tierney, which the Department of Foreign Affairs selected to represent Ireland at screenings of new European work at the American University/Katzen Arts Center in Washington DC in 2011."]
The Irish are storytellers, they say. Moira Tierney, however, has built an artist’s career without bothering too much with that.
"Experimental in form and documentary in content" is how the Dubliner describes her films.
“Her work, shot in 16mm film and video, in color and/or black-and-white, dispenses with conventional form and narrative,” Louis Menashe, an editor at Cineaste Magazine, has written. “The effect is startlingly successful.”
The Village Voice, for its part, listed her “American Dreams” series as one of the best films of 2003.
Tierney has completed more than 20 short works, including “Matilda Tone,” about the life of Wolfe Tone’s widow. Many of them will be shown at a retrospective and other programs connected with her work this month and next at New Orleans’ multi-disciplinary downtown arts center Zeitgeist.
The filmmaker, who co-founded the SOLUS Collective in Dublin, welcomed the opportunity to stay in the city for two months. “I was there for a long weekend a couple of years ago. I was intrigued by the city. There’s a lot going on,” she said by phone on Monday. “I was keen to come back for a longer stretch.”
As Tierney’s method usually involves working on the street, she’ll likely have a few busy weeks in an unfamiliar city. Her artist’s statement says: “I prefer to observe, camera in hand, allowing my subject matter to reveal itself. My goal is to remain open and attentive to circumstance.”
Her work – which so far has been filmed, for example, in Ireland, New York, Mexico City, Moscow and Nouakchott, Mauritania – “is interested in capturing life on the fly and creating incisive portraits of people and neighborhoods who escape the glare of mainstream cinema.”
The Brooklyn-based Tierney graduated from University College Dublin in 1989 and studied in Paris for several years in the 1990s. She moved to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship to Anthology Film Archives.
An Irish Echo 40 Under 40 honoree in 2008, Tierney has been selected to represent Ireland at many international film festivals and gallery screenings.
The dates for the Culture Ireland-funded screenings at Zeitgeist are: Feb. 10: Moira Tierney retrospective: Feb. 11: SOLUS Collective program, featuring work by Irish, Senegalese, Mauritanian and Egyptian film-makers; March 10: SOLUS Collective program of children’s workshop films; March 21: Performance art films shot by Moira Tierney at the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn.
For more information go to www.moiratierney.net.
