Dashiell Manley: Tule Lake
July 25-September 7, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 25, 5-7pm
Artist talk with Mika Yoshitake: 5:30pm
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Dashiell Manley’s “Tule Lake,” the debut of a new series investigating historical archives and political memory, on view from July 25 to September 7, 2024. The exhibition features several new oil paintings and a slide-projection that examines photographic propaganda taken during the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Using imagery sourced from the National Archives’ repository of photographs, Manley reflects upon the site of Tule Lake, an internment camp on the California-Oregon border where members of his family were held.
In this body of work, twelve paintings represent the positive and negative counterparts of six photographs. In the fish bite at night (2024), and its chromatic inverse, full water view, recreation possible (2024), a blown-out dot-matrix obscures the natural landscape of Tule Lake. When seen from a distance, binaries of dots converge to become recognizable. The composition acts as a metaphor for the distorting properties of time—how propaganda, for example, consumes and replaces generational memory and personal records.
At four by five feet, once removed from celebration (2024) is one of the largest works in the exhibition and uses found imagery of a child detainee. She is dressed as a flower and smiling. Composed of black and yellow dots, Manley conjures the tension between the subject’s expression and environment, using halftone abstraction as a form of guardianship or protection against unreliable depictions. Moments of wide, energetic brushwork intentionally disrupt the figure-ground relationship in each work. These interludes challenge a mechanized view of human experience while also providing delicate moments of reprieve.
In Manley’s two-channel slide-projection work, pleasant countries (Tule Lake), a desynchronized sequencing of National Archives photographic negatives, his own photographs of cherry blossom trees, and solid blocks of color. The work recalls the artist’s past videos and interest in structuralist film, where he would often alter sequences of frames to unsettle the cinematic ground.
Dashiell Manley (b.1983, Fontana, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from UCLA. He has recently enjoyed solo exhibitions at SOCO Gallery, Jessica Silverman, Marianne Boesky, Stanford’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts and LAND HQ in Los Angeles. His work was included in group exhibitions Hammer Museum’s 2012 “Made in L.A.” and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and elsewhere in Sao Paulo, Sydney, Torino, Vienna, Austin, and New York. His work is in the public collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2016, Jessica Silverman published a catalogue featuring Manley’s “New York Times Paintings.” Jessica Silverman also exhibited Manley’s work at ADAA 2020 in dialogue with the minimalist work of Jiro Takamatsu, one of the most influential Japanese artists of 20th century. He is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
