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Haley Manchon
Published on ArtPremium Magazine Winter 2020, page 113.
Haley Manchon grew up in a small town outside of Philadelphia and received her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018. She now shares a studio and gallery space with Kelly Sullivan, a fine artist based in Lambertville, NJ. The two co-own a collaborative art web application called Paint.Team, and Haley acts as the lead designer. Haley just had her solo exhibition, Exposed!, at Sussex County Community College in October. Additionally, her work has recently exhibited at The Peninsula Gallery’s Figuratively Speaking in Lewes, DE;CLIP: An International Exhibition of Works on Paper in Lubbock, TX; the Offscreen Art Show at Ground Floor Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Raritan ValleyCommunity College’s More Than A Feeling in Branchburg, NJ; the Strathmore Hall Foundation’s Annual Juried Exhibition Night in Bethesda, MD; and the Colored Pencil Society of America’s 26th Annual International Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois. She has been a resident artist at the Gilbertsville Expressive Movement (2019) and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s Currents summer program (2017).
STATEMENT
Since 2016, my work has been concerned with the overwhelming influx of information available today through technology, and more specifically, the frustration associated with navigating this information to find truth within a mass of fiction and bias. As my work develops, I still apply distortion to the figure in search of truth; however, my interest has shifted into an exploration of process and distorted imagery as a way to maintain agency over the work I create. This shift in mindset is less about imitating computerized errors, and more about creating a dialog between digital and analog methods in order to create a visual language that is uniquely my own.
The heart of my work lies in the use of labor-intensive media like colored pencil. It holds unique qualities of layering and precision that creates an intimate relationship with the drawings. Over time, the process of developing the work has become more important than the result. Images have been created by embellishing mistakes, manipulating drawing scans, screen printing, utilizing dura-lar’s transparency, and working from memory. The computer’s role is demoted from the primary source material into a tool for inspiration, as I embrace my own ability to construct distorted imagery.
As my work creates layers of physical disruptions through figures and portraits, I hope the viewer will reflect on how technology’s lens allows misperceptions of others and themselves to be created.
