ekphrastic obolus
Nick Mangan's the obolus takes his work to a new level, not only extending his range of materials but also his technique and thought. Mangan is certainly drawing on ideas familiar from earlier works, but putting them to new uses: the industrial objects (oil drums, dumpsters) of previous efforts are not so evidently industrial; the allusions are recalibrated here to new ends.
The obolus, which resembles a gigantic car speaker, it’s woofers distorted from the raw force of whatever the hell is blasting out, squats soundlessly on its little legs, hood open to reveal that there is nothing there but fake routers. No wires, no transistors, no nothing. At once minimalist (a single object displayed a gallery cube) and surrealistic (bizarre encounters of the disparate), the obolus has a genuinely weird presence. Part of this weirdness is that the obolus treats supposed quotidian objects, like cars and speakers, as what they actually are - highly designed objets d'art. This is a crucial aspect of Mangan's ekphrastic process, to reveal the art in objects that seem not to have any.
lt is also worth saying that there is something very blokey about this work of Mangan's: not only in its blocky, imposing presence, but also insofar as it draws from stereotypically masculine obsessions with speed and noise and to the enormous systems that sustain them. There is not a place on earth that roads and rock music have not penetrated, not an isolated jungle or icy waste that has not seen 4WDs or rocked out to Jimi Hendrix. Exemplary of the cutting up of the body of the earth into asphalt, oil routes, energy zones, and multinational commerce, cars and rock