Lee Mary Manning
Kiss of the Sun, Nov 22 – Jan 11, 2025

CANADA is pleased to announce Kiss of the Sun, a one-person exhibition of photographs by Lee Mary Manning in the gallery’s 60 Lispenard Street space. Lee Mary Manning’s photography is an exploration of quiet attentiveness. Their analogue prints are usually gathered into small collections within a single frame, and sometimes montaged alongside fabrics, printed ephemera, or discarded objects. Manning’s images—featuring everything from street scenes to intimate glimpses of nature and people—transform the familiar into something contemplative by focusing on subtle connections and eschewing linear time. The interplay between the pictures and found materials reverberates with tender care for life’s mundane and fleeting moments. This is Manning’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Notes from a trip to New York City, May 2024, written at 38,000 feet by Chantal Joffe:

Visiting Lee’s apartment/studio has the quality of a fairy tale. We walk downtown and through a playground where teenage boys play frisbee and ask us if we are teachers. When we say we aren’t, they look at us with suspicion and we hurry away and climb through a building site. Finally, lost in a car park, I ask a 7 foot tall man in a yarmulke with his foot in a cast if he knows the way to Lee’s building. It turns out he lives there too and he guides us to the building and to the elevator. Lee is waiting to greet us at their door, in their beautiful voice, hair blue grey, brushy and soft looking, eyes very blue.

The apartment is small and full of light overlooking the FDR bridge. I've brought Lee lilacs and they arrange them alongside a bowl of blueberries and a plate of pastries. We stand and talk about music and the Lismore Castle in Ireland and Illinois and look for a long time at their work and it’s associations; visual, verbal and poetic. They nod and say "totally" in their nice voice. When we leave and they hug me, I am big and they are small but we seem to understand each other.

Months later, I paint them in London and then later still they ask me to write about their work. I read these notes and they seem to me a good metaphor for Lee’s work. It is like a view inside another person's head; fleeting glimpses of another’s world view.

In my studio I printed their work out and arranged it on the wall. The photos burn fiercely like small fires. In I had a camera and wanted to change my life, a chocolate Easter egg with its nuts and guts revealed, broken open, sits on a floral plate. The plate is on a floral tea towel and is placed against a smaller photograph of a person's torso at a club, their T-shirt is orange and says "god" in lower case. An Easter egg and god in their broadest incarnations set side by side. Chocolate and someone dancing for joy, muscular arms covered in tattoos–secular joys in our modern age. The closest we get to worship maybe?

Lee’s work is like chess for me, my mind turns them over and finds connections. The simplest thing. A braid becomes a midriff or maybe a pipe and then segues into a tie that itself contains a kind of snake. The image is at once abstract, real and surreal. A sexy collage; as if you are seeing inside a person's body. Are we all just plumbing under our jackets?

A favorite of mine is a bench being submerged in grass and weeds. It reminds me of Van Gogh's bench at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, although Van Gogh's bench is made of stone.

As I write this essay, surrounded by Lee's images and thinking my way into them, I imagine talking to Lee and them smiling and saying "that tracks."

Lee Mary Manning (b. 1972) was born in Alton, Illinois and lives and works in New York, NY. Their work has been exhibited at St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle, Ireland; CANADA, New York; Swiss Institute, New York; Sibling, Toronto; and Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn. Recent group exhibitions include A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, St. Augustine, FL and Trust Me, Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2022, they curated Looking Back: The 12th White Columns Annual at White Columns, New York. Their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Cultured Magazine, i-D, Aperture, and The Brooklyn Rail to name a few. Manning received their BA in 1994 from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. Manning's photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

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