The Brooklyn Rail

In Lee Mary Manning’s News From Nowhere (2024), one of eighteen photo collages on view in Kiss of the Sun at CANADA, I encounter a pressed flower in a small plastic sleeve, like a tiny greeting card against a sky blue background. Emily Dickinson’s words, accompanying a blossom sent to a dying friend, return to me: “Though it dies in reaching you, you will know it lived, when it left my hand —”.¹

Doesn’t a primal loss bracket all pleasure and joy? Though, both pleasure and joy are more immediately apparent—the contents of these collages are often delightful. Against the bright green (almost lime) background of LOG (2024), squiggly blue handrails braid themselves over cheap terrazzo stairs in a chromatic inversion of the weird exuberance of the Mark di Suvero sculpture pictured immediately to the left and the white swish of a dancer’s leap above.

These collages include polaroids, paper, a paper bag, tablecloth, and tinfoil alongside (around, behind) Manning’s images, printed at various sizes, recalling drugstore prints of snapshots as well as more “serious” art editions, mounted on sometimes bright backgrounds. They exude the unselfconsciousness of intimacy. Throughout the exhibition, Manning employs a palette of primary and secondary colors one might associate with the sensual toddlerness of public works and elementary school, where relations of power among peers fluctuate according to the breeze of desire, where the monolithic paternal authority is at its most passive, allowing room for exploration, imagination, and play.

Kiss of the Sun orbits a loosely related set of subjects: trees, grasses, flowers, snapshot portraiture that flirts with candidness in its improvised poses, banal and intimate geometry, how language lives in the material and public world, eros in relation, friendship (human and otherwise), color, the sky, assemblage.

In Running into Nan at the Barberini (2024), these elements combine in that alchemical manner that seems to speak to or for the simultaneous presence and loss that both underpins and evades language; that self-negating simultaneity is roped into brief and coherent form by this group of color and signs. A cerulean (oceanic) blue backgrounds this personal and cultural library of 5-by-7–inch symbols: Narcissus and Atlas sit above a photo of the Rockaways, where a plane trails the question, “DEAR MERCE CUNNINGHAM — YOU BUSY RN?"; a line of dancers leaning and gripping on to each other is balanced by the sculpted form of a beaver’s abandoned work on a black birch in the snow and the latticed shadows of a postmodernist atrium window; an old couple looks at Edouard Manet’s Boy with a Sword (1861); a tear opens in crushed velvet. This quotidian set of signs borders an A2 print at the center of the composition: in it, clouds present the deep and bruised colors of sunset, the most enduring cultural symbol of the nauseating, repetitive banality and beauty of loss (day) and presence (color, breath, life).

Manning’s images are accessible in their familiarity and deepened by their specificity—at their most active, these collages are poems.

File Notes: Return to Lee (2024), a work that feels particularly driven by an engine of relation, features the late poet Bernadette Mayer smiling open-mouthed on a banquette in black and white. It’s hard not to think of Mayer’s Memory surrounded by Manning’s works, of how the meaning that accumulates around the development of an intimate and particular language of signs (whether images or words) is something that happens only in relation. This relationality undergirds the work of all art, but here, immersed in Manning’s intimate and particular language, it is brought to the surface, along with the grief and jouissance that drives us to and beyond language in a terminal effort to name the unnameable. And though we can’t possess that unnameable thing in any durable way, Manning’s arrangements make palpable that flash of it we can feel in a hug, in the glint of the sun.