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- Statement:
- About my work, where this stuff come from.....
I make large installations that transform spaces into seemingly enchanted environments, creating full body experiences, like trespassing on a theatrical set. My current projects are about making visceral transitory states of the human emotional experience tangible through the overabundance of crocheted, knitted and sewn fabric. Bodily fluid output becomes the physical marker of the teeming inner life. I’ve used Pheromones to represent love; Blood to show sacrifice and loyalty; Milk represents caretaking, the embodiment of empathy and the primal feeding of existence; the Silvery Mucus of a tiny slug represents the preciousness of our time here in this body, both valiant and evanescent; and Water represents a web of connection between the body as both literal and metaphoric vessel, cycling through both body and environment, blurring the membrane between.
My strategies for imagery are to present my own elusive interior narratives remade into archetypal tales. These “fairy” tales transcend the personal by mimicking theatrical illusions and tapping into our collective human mythology. My environments address the fundamental need for narrative, to examine the human predicament through story, particularly through using natural and animal forms. My conceptual process involves investigating archetypes, mythology and folk tales from a wide variety of cultures, seeking out imagery that coincides with our experiences of everyday life and speaks to the needs of our time yet also have an air of timelessness. By using animal and hybridized forms made up of the flotsam and jetsam of the thrift-store domestic, I’m attempting to shove the viewer into a vivid yet sometimes inexplicable world, a world that peels back the veneer on our uneasy relationship to nature; we both long to escape to the oblivion of the animal experience, yet fear disappearing into the deep wild of nature. I’m drawn to portraying transformation both in my process of making and in the concepts of the stories I dissect. The act of creating decadent forms out of lowly or discarded materials, particularly fibers, is always at work in my process, believing in the transformative power of the hand to turn the unappreciated into the illuminating.
I aim to wrap around and contain many paradoxes; the collusion of homeliness and glitz, hunger and indulgence, love and violence, the decorative and the meaningful, the diligence of the handmade and slovenliness of the animal realm. Every surface and stitch is laced with the hope that exhaustive labor holds the promise of the transformative power of Spectacle.
Most recently I’ve been, and continue to be, inspired to work multidisciplinary. I’ve involved collaborations with photographers, filmmaker, and movement artists blending community, installation, performance and amalgamation.
(that's a lot of words, I know....it's just how my brain works)
- Biography:
- Mandy Greer is a sculptor & mixed-media installation artist with an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington (99’), where she held a Jacob K. Javitz National Graduate Fellowship. Mandy received a BFA in ceramics and a BA in English from the University of Georgia (96’) and went Phi Beta Kappa. In Washington, she has shown her work at The Bellevue Art Museum, The Tacoma Art Museum, The Kirkland Arts Center; and in Seattle at The Henry Gallery, 4Culture Gallery, Soil Gallery, Consolidated Works and Priceless Works Gallery. She has also shown at the Tampa Museum of Art, Fl and Bucheon Gallery in SF. Her work is included in the books The Best of New Ceramic Art (1997), Fashion is Art (2003), as well as Soil Gallery, 10 Years (2005). Mandy’s work is featured in the video “Creatures” from www.muchacreative.com. She received a 4Culture Special Projects Grant (Seattle) and an Artist Trust Fellowship (Seattle) in 2004. In 2006, Mandy completed a commission of a permanent installation for the Children’s Center in the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library as part of the “Library Unbound” series. She was featured in a 4-person show in San Francisco at The Lab, in 2006. Also in 2006 she had a room-sized installation at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Seattle, funded by a grant from 4 Culture and a City Artists Grant from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, which was also seen at Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle. In 2007, Mandy made a debut in theatrical design with Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre’s production of A Tale of Two Cities. In 2008 Mandy had her first solo museum show at the Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington, debuting her largest installation to date, ‘Dare alla Luce’, along with a survey of her work from the past decade, supported in part by a 2007 4Culture Special Projects Grant and 2008 Artist Trust GAP grant. A full-color catalogue accompanied the exhibition. She was also nominated for the Portland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Northwest Artist Awards for 2008. In 2009, ‘Dare alla Luce’ traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in Portland, Or. Her current projects are about blending community, installation, performance and collaboration, including the “Silvering Path” — featured on the cover of the May 2009 issue of Fiberarts, and “Mater Matrix Mother and Medium” – a temporary public art experience commissioned by Seattle Public Utilities during summer 2009.
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