The work by Nicola Mann, a third-year doctoral student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, includes a series of beaded sculptures and wall collages that interpret an installation by German artist Daniel Roth. In 2004, Roth exhibited an installation in a Chicago gallery that created a mythic underground trail titled "Cabrini Green Forest." It expressed Roth's reaction to the dislocation of thousands of residents from Chicago's Cabrini Green public housing project.
In Mann's "Notes from the Underground," her wooden objects bring the "underground" world of Cabrini Green to the surface. "The spindly chains of beads are intimate relics, signs almost, which immortalize the street parties, family connections and community spirit that characterize the positive sub-cultural networks of the housing project," Mann writes in her artist's statement. "Bead, after bead, after bead, lean and lurch across the gallery space, each depending upon the next for support, and perilously close to collapse. This fetishistic urgency is an attempt to articulate the idea that the higher up the buildings go, the further underground the communities exist." Mann says her "journey" through Roth's work reclaims the social space for the residents of Cabrini Green.
Mann earned her master's degree in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and a bachelor's degree (honors) in fine art from The Surrey Institute of Art and Design in Surrey, England. She is currently showing a series of works titled "I'm going to Hell and there's nothing I can do to stop it" (2005) in a group exhibition called "Incongruent Counterparts" at the Positive East Gallery in London. She also has exhibited in other galleries in the United Kingdom since 2000.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the gallery at (585) 275-4476.