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Desert Dreams of Cocks and Bromance – Ann Marie Manker at Whitespace
Oct 2, 2015
Burnaway.org
By Matthew Terrell
In her new exhibition “El Gallo” (which means rooster or “cock” in Spanish), Ann-Marie Manker presents a surrealist fever dream where foreboding, dangerous-looking elements and characters take on a titillating appeal. Using a combination of drawing, painting, and a multimedia installation, she presents a world of morphological mutants and cartoonish characters set in an arid landscape. Read More
Ann-Marie Manker’s ‘El Gallo’ explores bromance and Tex-Mex
September 29, 2015
Clatl.com
By Muriel Vega
It’s been two years since we’ve seen Ann-Marie Manker‘s often trippy work brighten up the walls of the Whitespace gallery. As a way to prepare and research her current show, El Gallo, Manker returned to Tucson, Ariz. to confront her demons and examine her personal history. There, she found herself attracted to the rainbow colors, specifically the pinks and turquoises, in the Mexican blankets available in the area. Tex-Mex motifs influenced the way she addressed each El Gallo, including the title piece, which features an amalgam of a cowboy, a rooster, the desert, and sort of boogeyman from her past. Read More
Beautifully executed artwork simmers with aggression at Whitespace
September 21, 2015
Atlanta Journal Constitution
By Felicia Feaster
Ann-Marie Manker’s solo show at Whitespace Gallery is a Southwestern psychosexual brew of muscle-bound roosters toting weapons and sporting scorpion tattoos, draped in snakes and spiders and wearing belts of hot peppers.
The centerpiece of Manker’s show “El Gallo” (Spanish for rooster) is a demonic, spaghetti Western-style chicken mercenary strutting his machismo with a killer gleam in his eye. The bare-chested roosters geared up for battle that Manker draws in delicate watercolor, colored pencil and ink are the exhibition’s dark core. These unruly, hell-bent antagonists’ only moment of humility comes in a drawing titled “Queen of the Night” in which a hooded woman gripping an ax with her other hand circling a flailing rooster’s neck suggests a comeuppance for that strutting, devilish rooster.
Manker’s drawings of killer man-roosters are outrageously detailed, their skin patterned like cactuses or laced with reptilian scales and their faces filled with a tangible sense of threat and sentience. Manker’s technique suggests a mixture of devotion and terror: She draws as if her hand is compelled to capture her darkest fears in exquisite, accurate detail. As a result, “El Gallo” is a sublime combination of strong content, laced with dangerous undertones and fastidious execution. It may also be Manker’s strongest show to date.
Those serve as the monstrous, figurative representation of the equally dangerous potential in Manker’s other “El Gallo” works, which feature bandanna-wearing boys shaving with razor blades and roughhousing as a preamble to some unnamed, implied act of violence.
In “Homies,” two dudes wearing backward baseball caps are shown in profile as they touch cigarettes, ostensibly to share a light, though the gesture — and their expressions of eyes-closed bro ecstasy — looks very much like a kiss. A heady brew of male bonding and aggression underlies such works.
Manker’s show feels like the fever dream of a woman contemplating a world of male aggression in terms that veer from the utterly fantastic to the bracingly realist. In several of Manker’s works, her male subjects don bandannas to hide their identities, geared up for some kind of mischief — or worse — goading one another with a mix of beer, peer pressure and affection to action.
In case you missed that the show is about a certain stripe of masculinity, several works spell out the terms of “El Gallo” in bright Mexican serape colors and phrases that speak to male privilege and bravado, with words Lady Killer, Buck, Homeslice, Homie, Hombre and Don Juan written on their fiesta-colored surfaces.
The off-the-charts machismo of “El Gallo” is a departure for an artist more likely to revel in imagery in which women rule the roost. Manker’s sensibility has often put female figures front and center in a world where rainbows, pretty pastel colors and baby animals coexist with a degree of rock ‘n’ roll aggression and attitude.
“El Gallo” is work of a very different stripe with a far stronger sensibility that makes this show feel like some of the artist’s most cohesive and emotionally developed work to date. “El Gallo” is the stuff of nightmares, with enough violence and trauma lurking at its margins to inspire a profound anxiety, at how quickly scenes of beer-clutching bonhomie can turn ugly.
Review: Ann-Marie Manker Privileges Stereotypes in Under the Rainbow
April 25, 2013
Burnaway.org
By Lilly Lampe
Ann-Marie Manker’s latest exhibition, Under the Rainbow, on view at Whitespace Gallery, plays fast and loose with feminist ideas and cultural stereotypes, inevitably doing a disservice to both [April 5-May 11, 2013]. The cartoon-ish paintings and lace sculptures in this exhibition muddle a stock vocabulary of symbols relating to feminism and Islam—with a vague idea of oppression—and cross-reference news reports from the Middle East with American voyeurism, all in an imagined landscape of rainbows featuring cloud-men. In short, Manker creates a confusing confluence of themes that lacks serious investigation and promotes the very stereotypes she seeks to disarm. Read More.
Review: At Whitespace, Ann-Marie Manker’s fantasy worlds, populated by disturbing women
April 16, 2013
ArtsAtl.com
by Stephanie Cash
Ann-Marie Manker is a favorite Atlanta artist, and it’s easy to see why. Her paintings of fantastical worlds are well executed, graphically striking and wildly colorful. Read More.
Art Crush: Ann-Marie Manker’s Symbolic Rainbow
April 5, 2013
BurnAway.org
by Grace Thorton
Ann-Marie Manker dons a cheerful cotton dress, striped with blue and pink, to our meeting on the sunny patio of Octane in Grant Park. I point out her attire during the course of conversation, in which she describes being highly color-oriented and slightly obsessive over aquamarines and fuchsias. She gives her frock a quizzical look when I make the connection, promptly dismissing the comparison. Read More.
Review: Ann-Marie Manker’s birthday parties and suicide bombers score bull’s-eye at Whitespace
September 28, 2010
ArtsAtl.com
by Catherine Fox
It is a ballsy premise. Ann-Marie Manker sets out to imagine female Middle Eastern suicide bombers from the perspective of an American woman who reads about them and our various wars from the safety of her Cabbagetown home. Read More.
Ann-Marie Manker Paints Bright Fantasies of Dark Times
September 2, 2010
Creative Loafing
by Wyatt Williams
Ann-Marie Manker is among the busiest artists in Atlanta. Aside from teaching at SCAD and directing the new Kibbee Gallery, her drawings and paintings showed at the Roq la Rue Gallery in Seattle earlier this summer, and are currently on view at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. And all this while she works on a new body of work for Whitespace Gallery called Softcore War, opening Sept. 10. Being busy isn’t a problem for Manker, though. “Busy lately?” she laughs. “I’ve been busier.” Read More.
The Radar Now: Heavy Petting
October, 2008
The Atlantan
By Felicia Feaster
Anyone who ha entered the sactum of a young girl’s bedroom knows that certain motifs rule. There are the lioness-eyed Bratz and Barbies, the glacial drifts of stuffed animals and the requisite imagery of unicorns, puppies or kittens, the gateway love objects before boys enter the fray. Artist Ann-Marie Manker taps into that girl critter connection with a new body of work, Trip for Two at Whitespace Gallery. In these salty-sweet drawings, young girls frolic with koala bears (Couples Only) and baby animals in gardens framed by lascivious Georgia O’Keefe-like flowers. Manker was inspired by drawings she made as a child, but in Trip for Two the girly collides with the grown-up in imagery more acid trip than sweet dream. Pretty things gaze like Narcissus into a pond teaming with Beluga whales (Down by the River of Love) or merge with lions into hybrid feline-female creatures. The work has a romantic-obsessive, naughty and nice complexity that a melding of childhood and adult fantasies might entail. Trip for Two also features a sculptural “dreamy place:” a three-dimensional wonderland that viewers can enter (if they dare).