The in-between is what interests me most.
My work is an ongoing excavation and reconstruction of the self through memory, repetition, fragmentation, and material transformation. Working across photography, printmaking, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, I use images, recurring forms, found objects, failed works, and accumulated studio materials as fragments of a larger, continually shifting portrait.
I am interested in our attempts to preserve experience and the instability inherent in that process. Many of the mediums I work with have historically been used to record people, places, and events, but often those records are only the surface. What interests me just as much is what lies beneath, what has been forgotten, altered, obscured, or perhaps never fully understood in the first place.
Each piece possesses bits of life lived, a teetering of truths and lies, light versus dark, successes and failures. Through cutting, layering, obscuring, binding, repeating, and reconstructing, the work moves between what we preserve and destroy, expose and cover, and what eventually reemerges. Mistakes and unexpected discoveries are as important to this process as intention, often leading the work somewhere I could not have anticipated.
Together, these works form an accumulation of experiences, memories, and fragments of personal history. They are autobiographical, but not necessarily portraits of any one person or moment. Rather, they exist somewhere between recognition and uncertainty, embodying both what has shaped us and the deluge of what has been forgotten or rendered surplus to existence.
Christopher E. Manning (b. 1983) received his MFA from SUNY New Paltz and BFA from Manhattanville College. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in The New York Times, Queens Chronicle, AINT-BAD Magazine, Polaroid Originals Magazine, and Photoklassik International, among other publications. In 2020, AINT-BAD published his first monograph, Everything, As Perfect As It Seems, featuring his manipulated Polaroid photographs.
Manning lives and works in Brookfield, Connecticut.