Three years ago, on the way to accompany her partner for an interview on mental health with Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, Chicago-based artist Madison Manning had her first seizure on a plane in the Denver airport. (“The ambulance went through the supposed underground airport tunnels people have conspiracies about. Or so I’m told,” Manning remembered). That day, she discovered she had a form of dissociative epilepsy. Forced Necessary Rest, on view at Bunker Projects in Garfield, is a culmination of her work since her life’s focus shifted to prioritizing her health and wellbeing over all else.
“I can’t get stressed out,” Manning—who uses both she and they pronouns—explained. Since developing epilepsy, stress was a health trigger, not just a natural part of life. They had to re-evaluate how they lived their day-to-day life. To find relaxation and better mental health, they quit drinking, went on walks, watched old episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race and 30 Rock, and spent time “being an old lesbian” with their partner. But they had to transition into a life where they could no longer drive, go to Madonna concerts, or make the sculptural work they were accustomed to. Forced Necessary Rest came about when Manning participated in Bunker Projects’ artist residency. They picked up a children’s loom to start making work they could do sitting down.
Madison Manning Finds Glamor in the Fainting Couch
With a background in jewelry and metalsmithing, Manning has pays attention to beauty. There’s an echo of Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois or the trope of the “aging” southern belle in Manning’s work. The adornments of womanhood and femininity form a rhinestone-encrusted armor against a world that feels hostile and frightening. The work features glimmering rhinestones, hair, and sewing accoutrements combined into undulating tapestries of pink, green, and silver.
Self Portrait of An Episode, on Bunker Projects’ mantlepiece, shows a mass of lime green flashes and fuchsia and baby pink swirls of yarn. Synthetic black hair hangs from the fabric. It evokes the image of a woman on a fainting couch in a state of vulnerability, her hair spread out around her like a halo. They also imagined how in previous eras, they would be on a fainting couch, retiring from public scrutiny of their hysteria, as the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” was.
Joy and Fragility
Zoom In/Zoom Out (Feathers) and Zoom In/Zoom Out (Fringe) flank the self-portrait. These works convey how during an episode, Manning feels a sense of dissociation. The colors and shapes undulate through the fabric. Like femininity itself, it feels simultaneously connected to the body and depersonalized from it. The most glammed-up version of femininity can sometimes almost border on the grotesque, claw-like acrylic nails and vampiric cheekbone contours. Manning’s interpretation is somewhere in between, an abstracted version of femaleness that draws from the joy of both drag and traditional craft.
“When I am awake and feeling well, I want to feel joy,” Manning said. “I want to make things that make me happy.” Manning loves Laura Ashley couches and chintz patterns. In the Southern town where Manning grew up, femininity was tan, blonde, and over-the-top. These were things they didn’t feel embodied who they were.
In contrast to their work, Manning wears only black, with dangling diamond earrings and chunky glasses, describing themselves as “looking like a Muppet.” Their partner proposed to them with custom-made Muppets of the couple. “I’m not as mad at femininity as I was in my twenties,” they said. The performance of femininity is fragile, as anyone who’s tried to wash their dishes with acrylic nails on, walked home in the rain after a blow-out, or stepped in a sewer grate with heels on knows. Our bodies are fragile, too. “One thing I take note of when I’m weaving is if you pull in the right spot, it could all come apart,” Manning said. Just one thread. That’s all it would take.
A Necessary Space for Rest
“People have come by the gallery this week and said they ‘needed’ to see work like this,” Manning said. Viewers have found solace from the twenty-four hour news cycle or a moment to spend time with something beautiful. Manning’s work encourages all of us to put our health first and to imagine that it really was all on the line.
What if we treated our lives, our bodies, and our relationships as if stress and pain were a genuine health risk? As Susan Sontag commented in Illness as Metaphor, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Manning urges us to see that beauty, by nature, is fragile. If we want to live beautifully, we must live with care.
Madison Manning’s Forced Necessary Rest opens February 7 at Bunker Projects and is on view through March 16.
Story by Emma Riva
Photo courtesy of Bunker Projects
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