Stephanie Mann: Inherit This Mango @ Summerhall
Stephanie Mann’s ‘feel-good’ visual language radiates from Summerhall’s vast frontage; her installation literally casts a healthy glow over pasty, winter-beaten visitors. Intertextuality and digital trickery are the contemporary shot in a deeply traditional genre’s arm: Mann wants to “tickle people’s eyes” with her idiosyncratic trompe-l'œil still lives.
Mann is concerned with representation, placement and balance: both compositional and literal. Her arrangements are reminiscent of the tendency for domestic ‘curating’ of knick-knacks. They explore coexistence and interdependence in visual stimuli and the hand of the artist.
Objects from the kiddie, crafty end of the art spectrum are the players in Mann’s theatrical tableaux: gold paint, glitter, string, rubber bands and the ubiquitous contents of the fruit-bowl or vase. The star of the show is modelling clay: this nostalgic-magic medium remains mostly in pleasingly-ridged ‘raw’ form, occasionally morphing into droopy-worm or squidged-blob. Mann’s intuition for composition and colour elevates a kitchen table enterprise (which winks knowingly to domestic art veteran Tony Hart – god rest his soul) to the high planes of academic artistry.
Though sculptural principles inform throughout, the almost-horizontal and not-quite-vertical planes in the framed work give way to something suspiciously ‘flat’; on close inspection even the ‘live’ objects suggest an element of post-production which takes still life to a dizzyingly-meta level.
Visible slivers of Mann’s mysterious black poloneck make her steady hand both puppeteer and performer in the mise-en-scène. The artist-persona remains in the wings, though one can’t help but visualise her rocking out to the ‘keyboard-demo’ soundtrack of her neat little video.
By allowing the infectious positivity of her work to spill out over (plasticine-coloured) walls, Mann warms the cockles of the cynical and the numb, inviting them to play along with her brief moments of alignment. [Kate Andrews]