Even if you didn’t know Jeremy Mangan was a sculptor, you could tell it by one glance at his paintings. Now on display at Fulcrum Gallery on the Hilltop, “Build to Suit” features new paintings by this local artist that show off both his three-dimensional imagination and his two-dimensional technique, taking the basic American barn and morphing it into everything from treehouses to horses.
“Build to Suit” is largely a result of Mangan winning the 2009 Greater Tacoma Community Foundation Art Award. It’s a new award, with not much attached to it yet except cash. But that was enough to give Mangan, a Fife artist who has made a career carving ice sculptures in New York, a paid chunk of time at home just to paint. It also gave him the impetus to approach Fulcrum owner Oliver Doriss with the works he painted. The result is not only this show but several others coming up in Seattle.
Mangan has for a while now explored a painterly version of the barn, a kind of Modernist homage with soft detail instead of powerful line. What’s fun about the Fulcrum show is where Mangan takes his barn – a wild trip that goes from volcanic peak to treehouse to beach.
The trip starts with a horse: a giant Trojan horse that’s much bigger in the gallery than you’d guess from the promotional postcards. Taking up at least an 11-foot-by-11-foot square on one wall, “Trojan Horse” is exactly that, but created from planed surfaces of gray wood planks. Towering over a mountainous landscape, the Horse is pretty much life-size, and the illusion is all the stronger because Mangan reduces his snowy-capped horizon down to a few inches above the frame’s lower edge. Yet somehow, this surreal creature is docile, not warlike. The eyeless face waits patiently, the body’s muscled surface is domesticated by its barn-wall skin dotted with grid windows. All of it is superbly rendered, Mangan the sculptor seeming to carve three dimensions out of sheer paint.
Even more astonishing, when you look longer, is the gorgeous detail of the sky, the oils blended immaculately from powder to almost royal blue.
It’s this detail that keeps you staring at all of the works here: the textured curves and rivulets of “Cap for Mount St. Helens,” again done in oil except for the sassy striped planks arranged in a polyhedron over the volcano; the tiny shadows on the super-long staircase lead up to a barn on stilts.
Mangan’s Asian influence also is clear in the eloquent lines of evergreens, the austere shadows on snow.
Really, though, it’s all about the barn. The stilt version is intended by Mangan to be on a very low tidal beach – but it could just as easily be floating Dr. Seuss-like in a misty Northwest sky, with long bird legs. Then around the gallery walls, the barn goes sailing, tossed about in biblical ocean waves like a Midwestern Ark. It gets tethered and deflated in a cornfield like the Wicked Witch of the West, watches Fourth of July fireworks on a sad, deserted island, teeters on the edge of a snowy precipice and celebrates by wrapping itself with garlands of holiday lights, tethering it to a network of treehouses.
Mangan’s mood is hard to resist, kind of like a Miyazaki film still. In his sculptor’s hands, the unassuming shed takes on a human pathos, creating its own narrative in a world where two and three dimensions mingle happily. This is good art, but it also is a sheer delight to look at.
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568, rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
‘Build to Suit’
What: New paintings by Jeremy Mangan
Where: Fulcrum Gallery, 1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma
When: Artist talk 6-9 p.m. June 17; open noon-6 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through July 10
Admission: Free
Information: 253-250-0520, www.fulcrumtacoma.com, www.jeremymangan.com
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