Support Mobility and Stability for a New Start for Pat

• I, me, Pat, Patrick have lost my car, my ride-share job, and no insurance will insure me as of yet.

• I lost my living situation of the last 15 years.

• I am doing mental health treatment and living largely through the kindness of friends to guide me in a direction of independence.

The consensus by you friends is that I should be using Uber ride-share as a way to move around in SoCal, to move from one couch-surf kindness to the other, and to get to my “upcoming-GoFundMe” storage locker which will house important files and stuff for my living.

• First: I need an Uber Gift Card of $2000 or more.

• Second: I need a storage unit in the South Bay at about $120 a month - $1440 -Annual rent

• Third: I need a P.O. Box mailing address in downtown Torrance.

• Fourth: I need help to keep my phone on to keep managing my life. $500.

• Fifth: I need leads on affordable and couch-surf living situations.

Support with $1000 or more will get you an 11x17 photo print from one of the three images by Pat (see below) related to my book Nocturnia.

Support with $500 or more and receive a signed photo-book Nocturnia, culled from my 25,000 images of the South Bay wonderland.

Support with $100 and receive a mystery drawing and a matchbook from my cool and rare collection of ephemera from the South Bay.

Support with $40 or more and receive a thank you and a hand-drawn postcard.

Support with $20 and take a look at this “30 MINUTE Book Trailer” that features images from my photo-book Nocturnia.

• By sharing this page, sending it to your friends, spreading the word about my work will help me a lot to get to my goal of still living in the South Bay.

My soon to be printed book NOCTURNIA is a photography collection that serves as a schematic treasure-hunt map of South Bay Los Angeles. The project invites art seekers on a physical journey of discovery among the distinctive neighborhood’s arresting public spaces, vernacular architecture, period signage, and spookily-charged street views.

NOCTURNIA is a seventy-five page photo-book, accompanied

by a DVD short that documents the artist at work. As an artist, I want to lure willing participants out of the restrictive frame of consumptive viewership, vaulting them into immersive, active engagement with locations and experiences.

Here is a foreword by Gilbert Reavill in my forthcoming book Nocturnia

Five-Hundred Seventy-One Words for Pat

The Romans had their genii locorum, the Norse had landvættir, the Koreans seonangsin — spirits of a place, land wights, protective deities of villages or neighborhoods. The concept of the genius loci is in play all over the world, and that’s what I think about when I think about Pat’s art. I like to imagine his spirit passing over Torrance, Pedro and the South Bay of Los Angeles like a pair of finely feathered wings, protecting, celebrating, inculcating, imbuing, cherishing the ignored and unseen, seeding the skies with magic, enfolding every block, every street and alley, every empty lot and weed-choked wasteland with an uncanny sense of significance and love.

Orwell tells us that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” and Tierney teaches the same lesson. As much as Dickinson, Portis, Emily Brontë, Ferrante, and Pynchon, he sidesteps the celebrity of self to inhabit the celebrity of place. The man is an artist, surely, a recipient of awards and grants with an established c.v. in drawing, film-making, performance, found-object exhumation, and Dadaist sculpture. His recent photography declares him to be something of a historian and preservationist, as well as a sedens, a lifelong resident of his South Bay birthplace.

As a prophet, he is of course relatively unknown and unhonored in his own land. The locals might not even be aware of their genius loci, but nonetheless enjoy his protection. Tierney territory is similarly shoved aside and ignored, lost in the glare of L.A. glitz, known and savored only by a small community of South Bay aficionados who recognize the ground as the last legit neighborhood in the whole mind-thwarting Southern California conurbation.

But there’s something more here. Pat’s most important role is as an instigator, a provocateur, an insistent prod to the femto-second attention span of modern culture. Pat pays mind, which is the sole qualifying avocation of both the artist and the lover. “No ideas but in things,” states the poet William Carlos Williams, and Tierney presents the ideas of his home turf with a vengeance. The images tumble forth, seized with no more sophisticated a tool than a cellphone camera, an apparatus which makes its own comment on the subject. The work recalls Franco Magnani’s hometown of Pontito, Italy or, on a somewhat grander scale, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. Tierney makes us all into Torries, Torrancites, Torrancers.

“Let there be a small country with few people,” suggests Lao Tzu in Tao Te Ching. The Chinese sage imagines a happy realm, where residents can hear the close-by dogs and roosters in the next village, but where the homebody residents are “content to live their whole lives without ever venturing over to see their neighbors.” Tierney can sympathize. He’s a miniaturist rather than a panoramacist. His art reminds us that restlessness is the American curse.

As beneficiaries of Tierney’s tireless efforts, we are challenged to stay home, not in a physical sense so much as a philosophical stance. Permanence is temporary, especially our own. Eternity ends. Infinity terminates. Let the dogs bark and roosters crow. Tierney’s deserted, unpeopled streetscapes allow every human-built structure to recall its own mute, abandoned humanity, the echo of a shout after the voice has long vanished, the shredded odds and ends left over from the apocalypse, the silence of the open mouths when the footfalls cease. All we need do is listen.