Roq La Rue
presents
Mandy Greer
“Honey and Lightning”
Opens Friday January 14th 6-9pm
show runs through February 5th 2011
Roq la Rue brings a new dimension of art making to the gallery when Northwest artist Mandy Greer takes over the spaces with a series of installation pieces and photographs. Her work takes cues from folklore tales, archetypal imagery, myths and fairytales. Using layers upon layers of fabric, twisted, knotted and crocheted, Mandy is able to create natural world spectacles (from rivers to jungles) as well as mythically informed large scale installations that engulf the viewer in her mystically driven and darkly beautiful world. In addition to several brand new installation pieces created for this show, Mandy will also be exhibiting a series of photographs featuring her work, as well as smaller scale pieces such as a series of elaborate headdresses.
Artist statement:
“”Honey and Lightening” is a show of installation chambers, sculptures of talismanic birds and a series of staged photographs all revolving around examining the mercurial nature of human desire. The substances honey and lightening both have literary, mythical and archetypal references to the occurrence and evolution of desire and it’s fading. I see one as the slow ooze of pleasure and the other as the dangerous, uncontrollable and inexplicably instant occurrence of magnetism between two bodies.
Two installation chambers create full body experiences of these ephemeral phenomena and crystallize them in tangible form as a way to signify the human longing for a perfect stasis of experience – which is impossible as emotion begins to degrade, evolve, fold in upon itself after the initial strike.
The Honey Moon chamber is a 10 foot tall mirrored jewelry box spanning 12 feet, enclosing a giant engorged golden chandelier formation encrusted with tens of thousands of gold-colored trinkets – the cheapest of the trashiest materials but representing the purest element from the bowels of the earth that has induced lust to the point of violence since pre-history. This giant mass of gold, as well as the body of the viewer, is reflected infinitely in 35 mirrored panels that create a simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive encounter that memorializes a temporary event. The mythology of honey, a bodily fluid produced from flowers, has long been associated with the ooze of erotic perfection. An ambrosial month of drinking honey-wine has followed the wedding ceremony since the Pharaohs. But locked up in the folklore of this transitional period is that the delirium ends and the state of bliss is forever sought after.
The Cherry Tree Root chamber is, in a way, a reverence to my own experience with Colpo di fulmine — “love at first sight” in Italian, which literally translate to “lightning strike”, and a craving to re-experience a place and time that no longer exists. Recently digging a 16 foot deep foundation hole, my husband and I removed 72 tons of dirt from our property to build a studio, exposing deep and gnarled roots that seems like frozen solidified lightening, long forgotten, dug up by us to lay the foundation for the rooms we hope we’ll die in. The root chamber is like entering this underground world hidden from view of long- ago electric ephemeral desires that have now turned into strong and sturdy roots- not as flashy as lightening but quietly enduring and growing. The roots are battered beautiful twisting accumulations of crocheted scraps of fabric I’ve saved for years, old ropes and remnants of past installations, hand-spun hair, rabbit fur and old clothes, all coated in the dirt from below my family’s foundation.”
Mandy Greer is a mixed-media installation and multidisciplinary artist with an MFA from the University of Washington, where she held a Jacob K. Javitz National Graduate Fellowship. In the Northwest, she has shown at Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Kirkland Arts Center, 4Culture Gallery, Soil Gallery, Consolidated Works, Ohge Ltd. and Center on Contemporary Art. Nationally, she has shown at Bucheon Gallery and The Lab Contemporary Art Center, in San Francisco, the Tampa Museum of Art, 516 Arts in Albuquerque and Aqua Art Miami. She received a 4Culture Special Projects Grant in 2009, 2007, 2006, 2003 and an Artist Trust Fellowship in 2004.
In 2006, Mandy completed a permanent installation in the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library and had a room-sized installation at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival supported by a City Artists Grant. In 2008, Mandy had her first solo museum show at the Bellevue Arts Museum debuting her largest installation to date, ‘Dare alla Luce’, supported by an Artist Trust GAP grant, and had reviews in Art Ltd, Art Week and High Fructose magazines. She’s been nominated for the Portland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Northwest Artist Awards for 2008 and 2011. In 2009, ‘Dare alla Luce’ traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in Portland and Mandy was nominated for the Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.
She has created multidisciplinary works with Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre, Degenerate Art Ensemble’s Haruko Nishimura and filmmaker Ian Lucero, including the “Silvering Path” — featured on the cover of the Fiberarts Magazine, May 2009 — and “Mater Matrix Mother and Medium” with dancer/choreographer Zoe Scofield– a temporary public art experience. MMMM has traveled the Northwest with 4Culture’s SITE SPECIFIC program, to Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and will go to The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC in 2011.
She is premiering a solo show of installations and photography at Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle, in January 2011, funded by City Artists Grant.
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