Two For the Show

Jeremy Mangan is a painter and ice sculptor who lives in Fife.
www.jeremymangan.com


Jeremy Mangan, Two For the Show, acrylic and graphite on non-buckling board, 9½ x 12 inches, 2008.

“Two For the Show brings a new element into an ongoing series of drawings and paintings. For some time I’ve been creating and exploring a world of oversized and overbuilt house, barn, and shed structures. Building practices of the early American West are certainly a primary source for this imagery. There’s a haunting but attractive quality to old dilapidated wooden buildings. There’s also a particular logic—they were built to serve a specific and necessary function, with little or no attention paid to aesthetics. They were 'just good enough.' But they’re beautiful in spite of this, and because of it. I’ve taken this logic and expanded it to the point where it becomes, hopefully, a compelling visual experience and a useful metaphor. In that order.

Two For the Show adds a mural depicting two dead gunfighters to the side of one of these buildings. For me it’s something like an elegy, a monument, to a particular type of legend, at once heroic and villainous. Photos of corpses displayed as trophies are fascinating and horrible. Like the weathered barns, this is rich imagery.

It’s also fairly dark imagery, which is something unusual for me. In any case, I do see myself continuing to engage it and Two For the Show directly foreshadows my plans for the Telephone Room in June."
—Jeremy Mangan.

Jeremy Mangan is a part of the Telephone Room Gallery's Hello! show, on view from February 18 to April 30, 2009. Viewable by appointment—please email us. Don't be shy.