In the crux of the matter
Nick Mangan’s keenly anticipated first commercial exhibition proved that this young sculptor is not only serious but also highly marketable. In his previous exhibitions around Melbourne’s artist-run network, Mangan has focused on evolving the forms of industrially manufactured objects—oil drums, wheelie bins, dumpsters and speakers. He has presented them either with their internal mechanisms scooped out to reveal their empty workings, or as new worlds of terraced mazes or other faked inner parts. In these weird hybrid objects, a tension has existed between the readymade and handmade aspects. As Justin Clemens has observed, they are simultaneously ‘everyday’ junk and ‘cult’ or unique objects.
In the crux of matter swings towards the cult object. At the heart of the show is a gutted old Xerox machine, titled Elemental Exposure. Not only is this beige box the only readymade component of the show, when placed in the gallery it looks like a cardboard model in a Thomas Demand photograph. Its glass face is smashed and cracked. Inside, Mangan has imagined the shape of light’s movement as a set of imploding crystalline plastic shards. Beautifully carved, the result is a strange and abstract growth attached to the mundane piece of outmoded technology. The explosion is seemingly random and rhizome-like. Carved, jagged perspex and black plastic inform either the look or complete structure of all the other works. His objects are literally ‘petrified’.
The pleasure of Mangan’s work is the invitation to look in, around and through so as to decipher the new meanings given to familiar objects or the new life made for old materials. We find a mute play of the organic and inorganic—plastic exemplifying the difficulty of separating the organic