The Generosity of the Adorned Surfaces of Amanda Manitach
This week, August 15th – 20th, Guest Artist Working, Amanda Manitach will be working in the studio with me, using The Project Room’s large lovely walls for drawing, and other things!
Amanda’s hours in the space: M, T, Th, Fr, S; 12 -5 pm
I adore Amanda Manitach’s work. In some ways, it is so divergent from my own work, yet, I feel like our brains and eyes flit across baroque surfaces, seeking similar heightened sensations. I also sense a kinship in what I feel is her practice of probing the abject body from a care-taking stance. Whether she is painstakingly sewing onyx beads onto a lamb’s tongue, meticulously recording and inventing the convoluted ruffled forms of disease and erotic cavities in graphite, gilding a pig’s head, dissecting the ways words expel from the body and mind, there is always care, love and reflection…and even temperance.
Amanda also brings a generosity to the way she interacts with the creative community of this region; she curates, she writes, she analyzes and researches, she gathers people together. She shows up and participates, and contributes; not to shine a light on her own efforts, but to celebrate the works of those that she find invigorating.
Initially, I asked Amanda to come work with me at The Project Room on a simple impulse. We both spend, long, long, long hours doing tiny movements, she with graphite on paper and me with stitches and loops. Especially with the palette of my new work of silvers and grays, I thought there would be this curious tension between an austerity and the desire to accumulate to the point of excess in both our practices. One week of work for either of us is a drop of water in a sea of labor….what happens when we put a microscope on that drop.
As par for her course, Amanda has contributed so much already to my time here at The Project Room, and to TPR’s mission in general. She was a guest artist at the Defornament talk, and a contributor to the “Artist’s Who Interview” roundtable (including transcribing the conversation, helping me to create a record of that lively discussion soon to publish!) Watch out very soon on The Project Room’s literary journal ‘Off-Paper’ for some of her own deeper analysis of what it means to wear the multiple hats of artist and writer. I am so looking forward to spending this week, looking further into the generosity and furrowed planes of Amanda Manitach.
I’ll be writing more about this in a bit, but just a heads up…we will also be joined on Friday from 4pm – 5:30-ish, for a Guest Artist Conversation by multi-media, movement and dance artist Keely Isaak Meehan, artistic director of ‘Manifold Motion’.
We’ll be talking about her work as well as her own practice as a Certified Movement Analyst using Laban/Bartenieff & Somatic Studies, and how this may help me unravel some of my impulses to use my own body (as well as my husband’s) to explore this new work in Solstenen. Please join is in conversation, and some light refreshments.
