FZINE: a place for high school students and teachers to read, interact, and contrbute. LAUNCH
Dawn of Man is this SAIC graduate’s first Chicago solo exhibition and consists of four photomontages and one video work in the gallery’s project room. This work is a stunning, surrealist, futuristic vision of the exploitive historical narrative of primitivism. Mining images from old National Geographic magazines and other outdated sources, Mannis injects this imagery with an electric palette that fuses outmoded assumptions about non-Western cultures with the hyper-real presentations we associate with fantasy and futurity, albeit a retro-futurity of sorts. The work begs comparison with the digital bricolage work of New York-based African artist Fatimah Tuggar. But where Tuggar directly imposes pressure on the idea of subjectivity for African women in relation to techno-futurism, the subject of Mannis’s work is the notion of primitive imagery in general and the cultural baggage it carries. So why is Mannis projecting this image into a futurist paradigm? How does Mannis’s work intervene within the narrative of primitivism? The work itself is very well-executed, and while the subject matter is certainly treated in interesting new ways, I was left wondering if the notion of the dawn of man had been problematized as productively in concept as in aesthetics. A great show of new work, at any rate, and well worth investigating.
Josh Mannis: Dawn of Man, is on display at 40,000 through October 7th.
