Dashiell Manley

Art Brokerage: Dashiell Manley American Artist: Southern California native Manley came to glass as he was finishing his MFA at UCLA in 2011 and making text-based stop-motion animated films. In lieu of movie lights, he was using overhead projectors with colored sheets of glass to produce tints on the walls where he had drawn his cells, which he then photographed and animated. "I used glass instead of gel mainly to protect the projectors," says Manley, in his densely packed Echo Park studio. "After the productions I would end up with stacks of glass with these accidental collages." Tired of repainting his studio walls, Manley began using canvases for his cells and sandwiching them between the panels of colored glass. He has since moved on to tonal studies with gouache on linen covered by a single sheet of colored glass; the panels are all meant to lean on shelves and be rotated so as to encourage viewer participation. Manley's work caught the eye of LAXART founder Lauri Firstenberg, who put some of his pieces in the Hammer Museum's first "Made in L.A." biennial, which her organization curated in 2012. He was also included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, but his show "Time Seems Sometimes to Stop," earlier this year at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, may be his most sophisticated achievement to date. After months of what he dubbed "luxury waste"— unread copies of the New York Times — piling up on his doorstep, Manley decided to transcribe the entirety of the Gray Lady's front page onto 10 large canvases covered in hand-lettered newsprint that name-checks ISIS, Ebola, and Ferguson. "I like the function of the paper to date a moment or give context," says Manley. The canvases were washed and then hung opposite mirrored blocks the same size as the unfolded newspaper, atop which the artist positioned four crudely soldered boxes, sized to correspond to the front page's photos and made from stained glass recycled from previous film projects. With formal elements of replication, reflection, and erasure, the works stand as a meditation on the role of the newspaper throughout art history, filtered through what Manley describes as the hues of "a window in a Laurel Canyon flat, or these glass bongs by Jerome Baker you get in Venice. One of the reasons I used this type of glass," he adds, "was to resignify what it symbolized."