Ann Marie-Manker, Swan Song, 2010, acrylic, acryla-gouache, graphite, acrylic ink, and varnish on braced wood panel, 32 x 46 inches. Photo courtesy the artist.
Sometimes I find it’s important, and more fun, to disbelieve the things artists say about their work. Of course, active listening is still paramount: We should take careful note, for example, when Ann-Marie Manker says that her latest series “focuses on the daydreams of a young female would-be suicide bomber.” These words help explain the rationale behind the title of her new solo exhibition, Softcore War, opening at Whitespace Gallery this Friday, September 10.
When I visited the artist Wednesday as she put finishing touches on installing the show, however, I was fascinated to hear the stories behind her painting titled Swan Song. Manker’s volcanic landscape erupts into a rainbow mushroom cloud that, cascading toward the viewer along a circular curve, feels like a snow globe filled with happy devastation.
Here, tales of terror and war seem minuscule and far away: As one of the final works completed in the series, the painting highlights other, more personal themes that surfaced as the weeks went by. The model who posed as the story’s femme fatale is a fellow artist, someone who Manker considers like a little sister, and serves as an adolescent alter ego. The theme of lava comes from a childhood memory of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens; the explosion in Washington State was so powerful, Manker found tiny bits of ash near her home in California. These black flakes might have gathered on the hoods of cars like the Volkswagen Rabbit the artist drove as a teenager, represented in the gallery by the door of a real 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit. Manker, a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta, shows through her themes that exploring and questioning her path through life is itself a lifelong pursuit.
Long phallic black balloons (the kind that are often twisted into animal shapes) help break up the candy-kitsch coloring. Other paintings feature what appears to be oozing black lava or, if read alongside this summer’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, tendrils of crude oil.
But I wouldn’t overinterpret the significance of the news. “I can’t even watch TV or the news,” Manker said in a recent interview with Wyatt Williams.
The imagery has less to do with Afghanistan than it does with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a movie the artist referenced for landscapes throughout the series. These childhood and television-pop-culture connections are more compelling and, collectively, form a dream narrative describing what it’s like to be young, devilish, and girly, and grow up during uncertain times.
(Disclosure: Ann-Marie Manker is a member of this publication’s Advisory Board.)
