At Darwin’s Ltd, Cambridge St
1629 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA
Exhibiting artist: Michael Manning
About Michael | Michael Manning is a Boston-based artist and photographer whose work explores deep psychological & emotional states, personal trauma, and documentation itself using various visual languages and media. One recent body of work, ‘Between Two Voices’, is a fresh investigation of time, nature and landscape. A series of double-exposures, made particularly in New England watershed areas of environmental concern, the photographic images were all made in camera, within one second of each other. This work hopes to uncover a new language of landscape and place while offering final images that are beautiful and unified. Completed during the first summer of the pandemic, a photography project entitled, ‘We Will Live and Celebrate the Joys of Our Youth’, documents the lives of teens and kids at day’s end and takes place around one small Gloucester bridge.
In the studio he is working on a series of mixed-media paintings with complex textures using plastics, acrylics and enamels which are abstract but have rich allusions to figure and landscape. Michael currently lives in the Inman Square area of Somerville and Cambridge. He was the recipient of a small individual artists grant through the Mass Cultural Council during the pandemic and has recently exhibited at the Arlington Center for the Arts and at The Bromfield Gallery in Boston.
Artist Statement | This body of work, ‘Blue, Between Two Voices’, is an ongoing and evolving series of double-exposures, made particularly in New England watershed areas of environmental concern. These blue-toned monochrome photographic images are all made in camera, one and then the second, within a few moments of each other. The immediacy of the creation is a critical part of my process and engagement with the environment. Often involving dance-like movement the making of the images becomes a conversation with nature itself. In documenting these environmentally challenged areas my aim is to more fully express the beauty and fragility of nature while really pushing the boundaries of landscape photography and abstraction.
On a psychological and emotional level I’m exploring unification, a reunion, of voices, of the natures, within and without. I hope the final images celebrate the landscape and stand on their own visually while inviting questions about place and our relationship with nature.
See more from Michael!
Website: https://www.michaelmanningphoto.com/
Instagram: @meandro_id