Kent Manske: Making Sense

Kent Manske: Making Sense
March 21–April 28, 2024

NY2CA Gallery
617 1st St, Benicia, California
Gallery Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 12–5pm

Kent Manske, Landscape, 2024

Kent Manske: Making Sense at NY2CA Gallery presents original prints and artist books from multiple bodies of work that demonstrate the conceptual breath and creative practice of an artist whose well-being requires making visual narratives about the nature of things and matters of conscious. The artist, Kent Manske, considers his art practice as serious play. His work addresses the challenges of our complex times while celebrating the opportunity to reflect, learn, provoke and be more resilient.

Work in this exhibition explores human behavior, the environment, biology, aging, morality, politics and knowledge systems through many lenses including curiosity, spectacle, wonder, and empathy. Manske’s highly symbolic works are visual records of thoughts, feelings, and fears that seek understanding and insight while contributing to the visual language system he has developed over the last four decades.

Kent Manske, from Existential Epistemologies, 2024

EVENTS

Saturday, March 23
Artist’s Talk: Printmaking, 3–4pm

Kent Manske will describe the process of making hand-pulled prints including screen printing, etching & intaglio, relief, lithography, collagraph, and monoprints. He will bring the printing plates and tools used to make prints. He will address what is an original print, what is a reproduction, and things to consider when investing in prints.

Exhibition Opening Reception, 5–7pm
By email invite only. Subscribe to email list at ny2cagallery.com

Saturday, April 20
Artist’s Talk: Artist Books, 3–4pm

Kent Manske will share a brief history of art that takes book form. He will use books in the exhibition to talk about conceptual and technical approaches to making artist books. He will talk about who collects artist’s books and why.

NY2CA Gallery One Year Anniversary Celebration, 5–7pm
Live printing event. Take home a print.
By email invite only. Subscribe to email list at ny2cagallery.com

Kent Manske, Filter, 2024

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

I regard what I do as serious play. Asking uneasy questions feeds my studio practice. How does one make sense of the complex times we live in (pandemics, genocide, glacial meltdown, global mass extinctions, artificial intelligence)? How do we grapple with systems of control (authoritarianism, disinformation, algorithmic prompts, book banning, loyalty oaths, teaching restrictions) that deny these realities? We have many challenges here at the top of the food chain.  

Paying attention, not being reactionary, and staying grounded is challenging. It’s exhausting to be constantly trying to decipher fact from fiction, information from noise, genuine beliefs from tribal influences. Navigating reality can be disheartening, but cherishing the light sometimes requires exposing darkness—processing concerns and moral predicaments in creative ways.

The work in this exhibition explores human behavior, the environment, biology, aging, morality, politics and knowledge systems through many lenses including curiosity, spectacle, wonder, and empathy. Each work is a record of an investigation that gives form to complex issues and emotions. They seek not answers but larger conversations and continued points of intersection.

We hope to see you out there, making sense of your own complex and beautiful lives.

Little pieces coming together

Local artist Elizabeth Gómez has been working on a mosaic mural for the Magical Bridge Playground in Red Morton, a Redwood City park, for two years. Now it is done. Nanette made an opportunity to visit Elizabeth on site and came home with a Whirligig Interview.

Elizabeth’s mosaic mural is beautiful! and a wonderful gift to our community, not just because of the beauty of the mural, but also because she involved so many community members in the making of it during these last 20 months of covid. Read Elizabeth Gómez’s Whirligig Interview here.

Elizabeth Gómez, Magical Bridge Mural, 2021

We are pleased to have our You Are The Tree project included in an upcoming book, Embodied Forest, published by ecoartspace.

Twelve of our artist books are now being carried by Country Lights Books at the San Gregorio General Store in San Gregorio, California. Spot on if you made the connection to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Country Lights proprietor George is a big fan of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who apparently was also a big fan of the San Gregorio Store as a music venue.

Positioning, Artist book, Nanette Wylde, 2019

Nanette is showing Positioning in the 23 Sandy Gallery exhibition UNSEEN. The exhibition takes place at form + concept, in Santa Fe, New Mexico through November 20. We are pleased to learn that The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Washington state has acquired a copy. Thank You BIMA!

Redacted Babar: ABC Free, Artist book, Nanette Wylde, 2020

Her book, Redacted Babar: ABC Free is on view in a Hand Bookbinders of California exhibition at the American Bookbinding Museum in San Francisco through October 30.

REI Co-op wonderfully and unexpectedly acquired two prints from Nanette’s O Humboldt, O Muir: Worldviews series for a new store in Sunnyvale, California. These monoprints were created at a Palo Alto Art Center printmaking residency in 2019. Thank you REI and Thank you Palo Alto Art Center. We are curious to see what REI does with them.