Dashiell Manley | Periplums

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

For inquiries, please contact Kelly Woods:

kelly@boeskygallery.com

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Periplums, an exhibition of new work by Dashiell Manley (b.1983; Fontana, California). For his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Manley draws on his enduring formal interests in time, memory, and abstraction to reexamine the history of World War II-era internment of Japanese Americans—and his own family’s legacy. 

Incorporating focused, repetitive, and labor-intensive processes, Manley catalogues emotional and psychological responses to the constant, relentless streams of information that inundate our lives. Working from a host of quotidian source material—news media, film, cartoons, archives—Manley charts the process of absorbing, deciphering, interpreting, and interrogating this barrage of information, offering a reflection on the dissemination of information and the creation of collective memory. 

For Periplums, Manley reimagines a new suite of paintings from his ongoing Elegy series as a sort of map. With the Elegies—which he began working on more than a decade ago—Manley translates acute psychological reactions to an endless barrage of anxiety-inducing headlines into abstraction. Blanketing each Elegy canvas in a thick layer of oil paint, Manley carves repetitive marks into the surface with a palette knife—a practice inspired, in part, by the process of carving Edo Era woodblock prints. The rich textures and colors of the resulting canvases reflect the chaotic frenzy of the contemporary news cycle while subtle horizon lines allude to the deceptive tranquility of landscape painting. 

Manley bisects each of the new Elegy paintings in Periplums, cutting a channel through each canvas according to a section of the route from his home in Altadena to Manzanar, one of ten sites where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. In the fever pitch of mass panic that followed the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed for the forced removal of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans—the majority of whom were U.S. citizens—from their homes along the West Coast and subsequent incarceration in military-run camps in inland California, Idaho, Arizona, Utah Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. Members of Manley’s family—including his grandmother—were incarcerated at Tule Lake, the largest of the ten camps, located on the California-Oregon border. His grandmother and her brother were granted work release from the camp in 1943. Another family member who was incarcerated at Tule Lake was allegedly deported to Japan at the end of the war; as far as Manley knows, he was never heard from again.

Located in the desolate Owens Valley between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains, Manzanar is the closest of the Japanese internment sites to LA. Manley has visited Manzanar countless times throughout his life—first with his mother, later on his own. A few years ago, Manley began digging into the archives of the War Relocation Authority; the font of information he found there—in particular, the photographs Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams made of the euphemistically titled "relocation centers—slowly seeped into his work. Growing up with this history, Manley understood the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans as not only a trauma point in his own family’s history and an inflection point in American history. Witnessing the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans following September 11, 2001—and the treatment of immigrants by ICE in the present—Manley realized that there is a very real danger of this history repeating itself.  

For the past decade, Manley’s Elegy paintings have functioned as a meditative dumping ground for the overwhelming anxiety brought on by the onslaught of news in the moments it is written and disseminated. Transforming the Elegies into a map from his own home to this representative site of historic familial trauma—and rupturing in their surfaces in the process—Manley draws these works backward, into history, allowing them to carry the weight not only of current anxiety, but to the toll of witnessing the past repeat itself in the present. 

Alongside this suite of Elegy paintings, Manley presents a new two-channel film installation that reworks and abstracts, frame by frame, the 1939 Warner Brothers short film Old Glory, a piece of World War II-era American propaganda disguised as a Merry Melodies cartoon starring Porky Pig. Stripping the cartoon back to shapes and colors, Manley offers a poignant reflection on the role of information dissemination in producing collective memory and conjures a sense of cause and effect—a rumination on propaganda and its ultimate harms.

Periplums takes its title from a term coined by the poet Ezra Pound in The Cantos. Riffing on the Latin periplus (an account of a sea voyage), Pound used periplum to refer to a map that is experienced first-hand, as one moves through a journey, rather than topography viewed from above. With Periplums, Manley traces his own journey, a poignant pilgrimage to a place intricately interwoven into his family’s history—and to a moment in history that echoes insistently into our own. What does it mean, he astutely asks, to revisit this place, to revisit this time? What can we learn by reworking, renegotiating, and reengaging with the information about this place? And what does it allow us to understand about our own place in history?

ABOUT DASHIELL MANLEY

Manley’s work is featured in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Palm Springs Art Museum, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in 2016, and in 2017, he presented a solo public art project with LAND, Los Angeles. His work was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Manley received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MFA