Sharon Arnold
Bridge Productions
catalog, 2016

"Seattle-based artist Amanda Manitach is best known for her meticulous and ornate graphite drawings depicting lush tapestry, punchy phrases, and feminist undertones. The accumulation of marks, laboriously applied with a 0.5 millimeter mechanical pencil, generates an ephemeral filigreed haze, lurking between thickly blocked letters. Quoting internet-popular 21st century witticisms on Xanax, afterparties, bad girls, or a list of partygirl vices including cocaine and tears; the text belies the immediate impact of Manitach’s visual splendor to emphasize their contrast. This alignment of forms, sweetness, and sharp bite creates an irresistible candy delivering all the danger an overabundance of sugar implies. Love it while it lasts, because it might kill you from the inside later. 

Historically, Manitach has explored themes of sexuality, hysteria, revelrous ecstatic pleasure, and religious fervor through a literary lens — most often referencing her beloved favorite, Bataille. Her flirtation with ruffles, lace-like undulations, and the unprecious treatment of surface and paper began with abstracted representational work. In these portraits and close-up views, Manitach depicted large, ruffled, almost floral syphilitic growths, often aligned with graphic blocks of darkened paper and detached from the body. As the work progressed and her references shifted, she moved from these malignant protrusions transforming her visual metaphors into patterns derived from wallpaper. Their delicate, wraithlike presence drives home a feeling of dissatisfaction with the glamor of surface treatment. They ask us to dig further, exposing what lies hidden in the space between walls.

From a distance, these faint grey blocks echo the misty, dark, unending twilight of a Pacific Northwest winter. As though seen through a window, streaks, smudges, and spills haunt the page. In recollecting phantoms, faint remnants of the text she previously set upon the paper shift in and out of focus, finally receding behind whichever latest quip emerges. As if to add emphasis, her frenetic mark and energy both moves away from and returns to gather around the phrase, darkening the edges to reinforce the presence of the ghost, and the idea; and perhaps, the artist herself. If these are in any way an allegory, the semi-biographical subtext of the phrases underscores the outer versus inner life of the artist and those she aligns herself with. Placing herself in deeply rooted subculture relating to the infamous grunge era, heroin-fueled dreams and rain-soaked nights, she brings to light the feverish restlessness underlying the cataclysmic force of Seattle’s tragic icons, Kurt Cobain and Frances Farmer.

These charismatic, mythological protagonists in Seattle history embody intense creativity, devotion, beauty, disobedience, and defiance of conformity. One could imagine that for Manitach, the words of these particular celebrities are somewhat self-referential — the lines begin to blur between what is the perspective of someone else, and what is actually the artist. In stealing these popular phrases from the internet and superimposing them over a decorative background, Manitach hands over several layers of significance behind the metaphor of an ornamental object with underlying substance;  much like the bombshell who only gives us what we expect from her and never the breadth of her true inner life. This ambiguity furthers the impact of Manitach’s points on assumption, passion, performance, and depth, revealing a myriad of stunning facets to the beauty — and deeper meaning — of the work."