Mary Manning: In Excelsis
Festival dei Due Mondi 2023
Supported by Canada, New York
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Companion Notes, 2023, chromogenic prints, mat board, paper, artist’s frame. 59.06 × 51.44 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Arcobaleni, 2023 Chromogenic prints, tissue paper, mat board, artist’s frame 43.82 × 47.63 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Bar Canasta, 2023, chromogenic prints, mat board, artist’s frame, 81.28 × 101.60 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Spell, 2023, chromogenic prints, tissue paper, mat board, artist’s frame, 22.23 × 32.70 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Petrichor, 2023, chromogenic prints, mat board, artist’s frame, 57.15 × 102.87 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Rimbalzare, 2023, chromogenic prints, paper, mat board, artist’s frame, 36.20 × 41.28 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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From Monteluco to Spoleto (for Sol), 2023, chromogenic prints, mat board, artist’s frame, 41.28 × 52.71 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Quickly Aging Here, 2023, chromogenic prints, fabric, mat board, artist’s frame, 46.04 × 61.60 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Dopey R, 2023, chromogenic prints, mat board, artist’s frame, 66.68 × 70.49 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Their Theater, 2023, chromogenic prints, mat board, artist’s frame, 43.82 × 61.60 × 3.81 cm (framed)
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Down Here Up There, 2023, chromogenic prints, paper, mat board, artist’s frame, 26.04 × 36.20 × 3.81 cm (framed)
Complesso Monumentale di San Nicolò, Spoleto 23 June – 9 July.
Exhibition walk-through 23 June with Luca Lo Pinto (Artistic Director, MACRO Roma)
A solo exhibition of new work by New York based photographer Mary Manning. Manning’s new body of work was shot in Spoleto during a six week residency in 2022. Carefully arranged juxtapositions of 35mm analog prints and objet trouvé depict people, nature, the street, and the festival itself. Conceptualizing “paying attention as a practice of being alive”, In Excelsis illustrates how the ubiquity of photography, rather than overloading day-to-day experience, can form part of a balanced outlook on life and generate new ways of seeing and understanding. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with a new text by writer and filmmaker Felix Bazalgette.
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An excerpt from the preface to the ‘In Excelsis’ catalogue, by Guy Robertson (Curator and Co-Director, Mahler & LeWitt Studios).
…Manning has titled their show In Excelsis meaning ‘in the highest degree’. Perhaps Spoleto, the festival city, offers them a kind of ultimate canvas, an apparently seamless encounter between art and life: sat in Caffe degli Artisti on the Piazza del Mercato, a few steps from the Sol LeWitt studio where they are working, Manning considers the festival program – Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, all performing within two weeks of one another in theatres a few minutes walk from this cappuccino. Meanwhile more remote art histories (Roman, Romanesque, Renaissance…) are ever present in the town. The temporary communities brought together by the Mahler & LeWitt Studios residency program draw on these rich layers and offer opportunities for conversation and exchange. But for Manning, what really matters is how the everyday reality, as caught through a point-and-shoot camera, speaks alongside these ‘higher’ forms of art. Manning’s is an egalitarian approach to art: an ideal of self-expression, reflection and imagination, pieced together from fragments of experience, ‘snapshots’ and objet trouvé.
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Mary Manning (b. 1972, Alton, Illinois) is represented by Canada, New York. They have also exhibited at Sibling (née Little Sister), Toronto; and Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn. In 2022, they curated ‘Looking Back: The 12th White Columns Annual’ at White Columns, New York. A book compiling recent work, ‘Grace Is Like New Music’, was published by Canada in 2023. Manning received their BA in 1994 from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL.