On Friday, March 29, 2024, Jason Manley will conduct masterclasses and individual mentoring sessions for AUR students. He will also exclusively present a new series of work titled Nomadic Journal at the AUR campus in Monteverde.
Jason's creative works combine poetry, architecture, furniture, and digital design elements to produce sculptures formed by text or experimental writing. Nomadic Journal is a culmination of work created while attending artist residencies in Portugal where traveling, or transport, is conceptually tied to the making. The sculptures are collapsible monuments designed to compact into suitcases, addressing ideas of impermanence, leisure, and roaming.
The featured sculpture, Fountain, 2024, is a life-size sculpture of a clawfoot bathtub made of paper, glue, and wood. For this piece, Jason’s sculpture process began with writing a poem, which was used in digital design fabrication. Numerous layers of laser-cut paper were applied as an additive sculpture material where the text wraps and envelops the interior walls of the tub, which was molded from an existing bathtub at Buinho Artist Residency in Portugal. The bathtub, as a form, is an intimate space referencing the body, while the act of perforation transforms its meaning from utilitarian to ephemeral, balancing between the dimensional and the literary.
Jason Manley - a short biography
Jason Manley creates sculptures, installations, and public art that combines typography and experimental writing with sculptural forms. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Buinho in Portugal, the Torrance Art Museum in California, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the Valerie Lambert Gallery in Brussels, the Museum of Public Fiction in Los Angeles, and the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art.
Recent notable group exhibitions include In Verbis Artis at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Skulpturengarten at the Reef in Los Angeles, and Fixed Flux, a two-person exhibition at Jaus Gallery in Los Angeles.
He has created public artworks in California, Iowa, Utah, and Nebraska and was co-creator of “A Path Forward,” a sculpture monument environment commemorating suffragists and voting rights activism at the Utah State Capital Collection in Salt Lake City. An MFA graduate of the University of Arizona, he has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Art, the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, PADA, Buinho, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and Illinois State University. He was awarded artist grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York; Arizona Commission of the Arts, Phoenix; and the Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco.
Jason currently serves as Professor of Art, Head of Sculpture, at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.
Artist website: http://www.jasonmanley.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason_manley/
