With/out

Stephanie Manzi, MFA 2022 Rome Campus, Painting

As I paint, draw and collage, marks collide into bands of color and form that map,  frame; measure, separate and merge disparate elements. Over the surfaces, information becomes  revealed and concealed into new configurations through processed based systems of repetition  and recycling. In the studio, I grapple with concepts of landscape in relation to painting and eco theory through environmental interaction. Within landscape and ecology, deeply imposed  structures around nature form distances between ourselves and our understanding of the natural  world. Painting can mirror the same distancing. It creates a window, an object, and a  conceptually separate pictorial space that can feel detached from the viewer's reality.  Therefore, the experience of painting and conversations within ecology are similar; both  beautiful, complex, and dark, hopeful and light. The work is left to straddle similar  contradictions as well: permission and limitation, play and investigation, accumulation and loss,  structure and the unbound. Although I frequently question the role of painting, abstraction and  theory, I believe all three can work together to address our relationship to the environment and how  to think "ecologically." My hope is that as the work continues to develop, the intersection of  painting and ecology can create a space of connection, joy, conversation and inquiry.  

With/out represents a new body of paintings and collages created during my final  semester at Temple Rome. The show title refers to what is accompanied by, having possession  of, indicating an action or opposition, a relationship to and a doing and undoing, as well as what  is beyond the surface, what has been lost and what can be gained. The title and work try to speak  directly to the process of painting through layered actions, working to parallel contemporary  environmental conversations.