Ashley Crawford spoke by email with Nick Mangan in New York about his latest work and ideas
Watching the evolution of Nick Mangan’s work over recent years has been not unlike watching a mutant virus growing and evolving everyday. It began as a small mold in the corner of the lounge room and has spread to encompass the entire house. To date we have watched it grow out of an arctic thaw (due, one wonders, to global warming?). We have watched it move through its prehistoric era and mutate into an almost recognisable moment of cultural invention. What will happen when it reaches the present day? And worse—the future?
If Mangan’s most recent work, produced in the Australia Council’s New York studio, is anything to go by, things are bleak indeed. It is as though Mangan was in synch with the atomic scientists at the University of Chicago who recently updated the symbolic Doomsday Clock which tracks the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. The clock is currently set to five minutes to midnight—Armageddon—having been advanced by two minutes on January 17, 2007. One can imagine the clock on Magnan’s studio wall set at one minute after midnight.
There has always been something unsettling about this artist’s works. Compositionally they are elegant, well-planned and meticulously executed sculptural assemblages. But there is also an intricate and epic narrative evolving, chapter by chapter, work by work, show by show. Already, at age of 27, a survey exhibition of Magnan’s work to date would reveal a truly obsessive individual. He is known for his sculptures, but his works on paper—inks and montages—are equally intense and bizarre. It is tempting to think of Magnan as... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline