Artist of the Month: Mandy Greer

[Chandelier, Sculpture, The Wolf Prince and The Parrot Princess installation, Priceless Works Gallery, Seattle, April 2004. Photos from Flickr profile]

I came across Mandy Greer while checking up on exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft. Her undergraduate study included a B.A. in English and B.F.A. in Ceramics from The University of Georgia Athens, and an M.F.A. in Ceramics from The University of Washington, Seattle.

I love the way her installations and sculptures are saturated with monochromatic color schemes, textures like string and cloth, and cross-pollinated themes of domesticity, fauna, and spirituality. They are like frozen glimpses of dreams, suspended and trailing in out of realistic and subconscious images.

"Mandy’s work presents her own elusive interior narratives remade into archetypal tales. These “fairy” tales transcend the personal by mimicking theatrical illusions and tapping into a collective mythology of imagery. By using animal and hybridized forms made up of the flotsam and jetsam of the thriftstore domestic, Greer shoves the viewer into a vivid yet sometimes inexplicable world with the meaning always on the tip of one’s tongue. Her installations attempt to wrap around and contain many paradoxes; the collusion of homeliness and glitz, hunger and indulgence, love and violence, the decorative and the meaningful, the diligence of the handmade and slovenliness of the animal realm. Every surface and stitch is laced with the hope that exhaustive labor holds the promise of the transformative power of Spectacle." (Quote from Greer's Blog.)

Geer's Flickr photos
Greer's personal blog and official web site
Greer's MyArtSpace profile
Details for Greer's upcoming Dare alla Luce exhibition at Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft