Metrowest Daily News
Thursday, March 30, 2006

By Chris Bergeron

Exhibit:

Twice Reflected

Earthly Pleasures:
Painter Ilana Manolson captures nature's ephemeral beauty

Taking a "frog's eye view," Ilana Manolson's paintings capture nature's fecund profusion in a small patch of her back yard.

The Concord artist mixes rich radiant colors to observe the ephemeral beauty of a clump of skunk cabbage or sunlight reflected of a weedy pond.

Manolson's recent paintings meld her earlier career as a botanist with an Impressionist's infatuation with the play of light on nature.

She is showing 16 striking large scale oil paintings from 2005 and 2006 at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham. Her exhibit, "Twice Reflected," runs through April 23.

Manolson described her work in the show as "a dance between realism and abstraction."

She paints "en plein air," focusing on small spots in her yard or local places where she walks. Working quickly, she paints on a hard birch board that let’s her recreate the rich natural colors she sees.

"I think what's new is this work catches the essence and spirit of the plant world. The visual world is so rich. If you look for tiny details, they help you describe the larger whole of the environment around you," she said.

Examining things closely, Manolson finds natural dramas she calls "the ignored, inconsequential events" most casual observers miss.

Cattails break through a sheet of ice. Insect-eaten leaves float across a pond's still surface. Sunlight’s burst through a riotous tangle of foliage.

Manolson said her approach to nature-in-miniature "creates a painting with its own dance and rhythm."

"If you look closely enough, abstract patterns emerge," she said. "My work reflects different emotional states. It's the world around me seen through these emotional states."

Manolson has lived in several widely varied places with their own unique natural character.

She was born and raised in Calgary, Canada, and vacationed with her family around the cluster of lakes in the Laurentians region north of Quebec. "I grew up next to a pond. So I developed a sense of looking at life in miniature," she said.

As a teenager, she taught in the Fiji islands in the South Pacific with a Canadian volunteer organization. After returning, she earned a degree in botany and later worked as a naturalist in Elk Island National Park in Edmonton.

Manolson said, "I spent a lot of time looking closely at things. I loved drawing plants."

For Manolson, the seemingly divergent disciplines of botany and painting share her artistic interest in the harmonious balance of opposing forces.

"They're very connected. There's a sense of looking for order and disorder and how they play together. I'm looking for the dance between the two," she said.

Her paintings' titles, "Embracing Weeds," "Transition Tango" and "Fog has a Story" suggest her belief in the organic unity of all living things.

Seeking a new direction, Manolson graduated from the Rode Island School of Design in 1982 starting a new career as a painter and printmaker. She was a partner and co-founder of Artist's Proof, a collaborative print studio in Boston. She has had numerous shows in area museums and is represented by the Clark Gallery in Lincoln.

Danforth Director Katherine French said Manolson's paintings offer viewers "a complex vision that's true to how their eyes see things."

"There's something very special about her work that causes viewers to ask how they look at things," she said. "She just does it. She's at the top of her game."

Art New England
Regional Reviews: Massachusetts

Exhibit:

Beyond the Categories at Concord Art Association

Beyond the Categories: A Paint/Print Dialogue
by Meredith Fife Day

When curator Ilana Manolson talks about this show, she refers as often to the "dance" between painting and printmaking as she does to the dialogue. The distinction between the two, and the inclusion of both, gives unity as well as enormous range to the work of the six artists exhibited. Manolson's own work as both a painter and printmaker gives a pronounced sensitivity to the excitement of process, this exhibit's ascendant theme.

Catherine Kernan and Michael Mazur cross boundaries between painting and printmaking by combining the two. Kernan, in adjoining 12-inch square boards has divided and painted over a large print. In the resulting irregularly edged grid, she brings attention to the unrestrained growth of her images of leaves, stems, and branches. Mazur, whose extraordinary calligraphic vocabulary and color sense naturally expand existing language and methods, turns in his new work to stencil, collage, and airbrush. He seems to rule nothing out and experiments with open-ended inventiveness that bridges his early work with the present.

Peik Larson and Joel Janowitz move between the print and the painting with offhand poise, as if they are performing a masterfully scripted monologue. Larson's 47-inch-by-72-inch oil on board Palmeria has the crisp sparkle of his monoprint, and Janowitz, in Greenhouse Shadows: Hanging Plants, imbues his monotype with painterly richness. Heddi Siebel and Peggy Badenhausen give each medium more control over expression. Siebel paints on-site with fresh, quick handling of oil and exactitude of light. Her prints, also of the landscape, are dark and turbulently expressive. Badenhausen, working from dance and music notations, brings an intellectual order to her prints that is subsumed in her large and arresting oil painting, In the Distance, by a physicality as fundamental and life-giving as breathing.

The Boston Globe
Friday, October 21, 2005

Exhibit:

Looking Down to See the Sky at The Clark Gallery, Lincoln, October 2005

A Meeting of Mediums
by Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondant

Ilana Manolson, better known as a printmaker, is showing her paintings at Clark Gallery - and they reveal a printmaker's touch. Painters build light by layering colors; printmakers let the light shine by leaving their plates bare and letting the paper show through. Manolson uses both techniques. In taking a frog's-eye view of pond life, putting us amid the reeds and water, she uses her paint the way she might use ink in a monotype, ranging from watery washed to more opaque, cleanly articulated forms.

The vivid, accomplished results pulse with energy. Up close, the works look dense and lusciously abstract, but form a distance the intimate landscapes appear. "Embracing Weeds" sets blue-green leaves and dark green fronds in a party over the surface as the bluish ground beneath drips and dissolves. "Autumn Smells Like Change" closes in on a tiny, reflective passage of purple-red water. Brown reeds rise as their husks peel off and dangle along the water's surface.

Manolson's mastery of her medium and her easy with the thicket of perceptions at pond level, from geometric rhythms to the way water shimmers, turn her simple subject matter into opportunities for revelation and reflection.

Concord Journal
Thursday, March 6, 2003

Exhibit:

Deep Diving in Shallow Water

The Boston Globe
Wednesday, February 16, 2000

By Christine Temin
Globe Staff

Exhibits:

Putting Down Roots /
Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die

Perspectives

What unites the solo shows two Boston artists at Clark Gallery - monoprints and paintings by Ilana Manolson and glazed stoneware vessels by Bruce Barry - is their shared organic quality. Manolson, who uses everyday objects to express emotional states, and whose exploding house series of many years ago suggested a world of disorder, here focuses on a simple flower bulb. Her world, the image suggests, has calmed down.

Most of Manolson's works at Clark are monoprints, each with a bulb in some stage of its natural cycle. Root systems dominate; some are long and lacy others tenacious and muscular. Roots and bulbs are, of course, generally unseen, covered by earth; in revealing them, Manolson also reveals their strength and ultimate vulnerability. Some bulbs are in bloom but the flower is the least of what's happening here, the tip of the iceberg. Some flowers droop like Barry's pots; one stem arches extravagantly, as if trying to go somewhere else.

Manolson floats her bulbs in ambiguous environments of mossy greens, creating a kind of bulb heaven. An exception to the general serenity of these works is the seven-part series '”Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die." The words of the title are stenciled on backgrounds as tumultuous as an ocean in gale-force winds; in the center of each print is bulb trying to ride out the storm and get on with life.

Barry's and Manolson's works are at Clark Gallery in Lincoln through Feb. 24.

The Boston Globe
Friday March 2, 2001

By Cate McQuaid
Globe Correspondant

Exhibits:

Putting Down Roots /
Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die

Art Review: Beauty of these artworks printed dearly

It's easy to conjure up the romantic image of an artist in his or her garret, toiling away alone to turn inspiration into art. Printmakers who rely on big presses to make their work don't often have that luxury of solitude. They invest with other artists in cooperative studios, where many people have access to the machinery of their medium. They end up having a different luxury: community.

In 1980, four recent art school graduates rented a space in East Cambridge and installed some presses. Jane Goldman, Catherine Kernan, Ilana Manolson, and Mary Sherwood called their enterprise Artist's Proof Studio. After only four years of creative cross-fertilization, the studio closed when gentrification priced the artists out of the rented space. Its passing was not wasted, though; artists who worked there went on to found their own printmaking studios, in the Boston area and in South Africa.

“Proof In Print: A Community of Printmaking Studios" at the Boston Public Library's Wiggin Gallery, takes a close look at the work of Artist's Proof and its descendants, the Mixit Print Studio and Hand Press Workshop in Somerville, and Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, South Afri-ca. The show, which travels here from Johannesburg, is the brain-child of the original Artist's Proof founders and Sinclair Hitchings, keeper of prints at the BPL. The exhibit features a selection from portfolios made especially to trace and celebrate the genealogy of Artist’s Proof. Sales of the portfolios will benefit the South African studio, the only collective of its kind in that region, founded by Artist's Proof printmaker Kim Berman.

There are pictures from the 1980s on view in a side gallery, but the main event is the contempo-rary work put together for the portfolio. Manolson's "Putting Down Roots," an Ink Jet print and monotype, shows a cluster of plants and stones with roots spraying beneath them, embossed from the ink-stained roots them-selves. Berman's "Ashes of Truth" is a three-plate intaglio suggesting a smoky, surreal landscape smol-dering in a mustardy haze, barren save for occasional tufts of grass sprouting against hope.

Berman went on to found Artist Proof - the name a nod to its predecessor - in South Africa. These African prints, by Berman and a half-dozen other artists, stand out from the Boston prints in both color and content; many of the works are saturated with yellows, greens, and reds, and almost all of them are representational, with a strong narrative element Pauline Mazibuko's four-color lithograph “At the Market Place" appears sun-drenched, with women shading themselves beneath a parasol, seated on the ground, selling fruit. Jacob Motsoane's etching and aquatint celebrates a newfound right: A black man casts a ballot, slipping it into the slot of a big, wooden box.

Hand Press Workshop specializes in experimental monotypes. Deborah Olin’s piece from “The T-Shirt Series" suggests she ran the inky T-shirt through the press. At the Mixit Studio, the setup of presses and studio space makes artists more prone to work independently. You can see the independence in the wide range of techniques and subject matter coming from Mixit. Joanna Kao's woodcut "Face" looms up in grainy white from a sea of black ink, a harrowing visage that is grim and war-like. Jennifer Perry's "Mnemosyne II," was printed from a soft etching plate stitched with human hair, delicate and unsettling strands over a bird cage shape.

It's nearly impossible to trace the influences the Artist's Proof printmakers and their descendants have had upon one another. Each is confident enough to his or her own artistry that no work seems derivative of another. The South African prints stand out for the shared vision of their culture; because the culture is still defining itself post-Apartheid, it makes sense that the art would be more narrative as the artists tell the stories of who they are becoming.

At: Wiggin Gallery, The Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston St., through May 27
Boston Printmakers 2001 North American Biennial
At: 808 Gallery, Boston University, 808 Commonwealth Ave., through April 8

ART NEW ENGLAND 1996 August/September

by Susan Maluski

Exhibit:

The Unstill Life

Randall Beck Gallery / Boston
Ilana Manolson: The Unstill Life

Usually inanimate objects ascend, soar, rotate, and gyrate in Ilana Manolson's The Unstill Life, this accomplished artists fifth one-person show at the Randall Beck Gallery. In this likable exhibition, Manolson uses ordinary kitchen objects to show the motion and emotion of everyday life. The artist explains, "I try to capture the fragile balance of competing demands, as stacked plates or bowls strain to avoid falling." This kinetic crockery, with its connotation of home and hearth, captures the imbalance, upheaval, and strain of the domestic realm.

There is a definite feeling of weightlessness and things spinning out of control in many of the thirteen monoprints: the contents of cups spatter up and out, bowls oscillate as if they are about to blast off. In Motion/Emotion, green bowls and cups teeter precariously on the edge of a table and an elongated spoon almost becomes a projectile hurtling upward. Oddly enough, the unsettled feeling brings to mind Cezanne's still lifes in their distorted angles and highly manipulated perspective.

In Coffee Cup Dreams four stacked bowls appear to have been dropped, their fall caught just before impact. A sense of arrested movement is heightened not only by the energetic composition but also by the active brushstroke, splotches, and sprays of vibrant color. Amid the upheaval, a small red cherrylike form appears to be the only static object in the composition, stable reference point in the flux of dishes.

Hues used throughout the show - marigold yellow, saffron, red-orange, chartreuse, parrot green, Caribbean blue--are radiant thanks to the artist's inspired juxtapositions. In Tea and Tango, an image with two blue-green bowls on a turquoise table, one small orange orb bal-ances the group; in Kitchen Flight swirls of yellow-green shoot out in spirals with energy of a tornado unleashed from inside the cupboard.

The show includes several more subdued restful works. Ghost of Tea Times Past could take place underwater, the murky blue-green palette accented by white air bubbles. In Forged Path, deep blues, greens, and purples form two cups in a bowl rocking and swaying in the frothy waves. Only the glimpse of a table edge, a small bright orange zip, brings us back to terra firma.

Dirty Dishes, the only oil painting exhibited, depicts several thick weighty jars crammed into a heavy, round, shallow bowl. Compared with the hyperactive locomotion of the cups and saucers, the jars look in dire need of liberation. Perhaps these tightly capped jars could also benefit from letting off a little steam of their own.

The Boston Globe
April 25, 1996

By Cate McQuaid
Globe Correspondent

Exhibit:

The Unstill Life

Dancing Dishes; rocking horse winners; affable animals

"Unstill Life," Ilana Manolson's show of monoprints at the Randall Beck Gallery, could alternately be titled "The Secret Life of Bowls." These prints, swirling with light and breathtaking color, take the domestic subject of many still lifes and set it spinning. The artist suggests in her statement that her works address the chaos of real life that belies the fragile order of a well-stocked china cabinet, but the sheer beauty of her images brings them head and shoulders above any frank discussion of disorder in the realm of magic.

Manolson equates motion with emotion, and her prints rush and bubble breathlessly with swift brush strokes. "Tea and Tango" takes place on a rich turquoise ground suffused with light. A dusky, periwinkle bowl rimmed with the white of the exposed paper sits near the bottom of the frame, and a golden, bubbly fire rushes out of it, both pushing and cradling a second bowl. The fire curves around the second bowl and back into it, where it cushions a mug that spins away from the bowls as a sparkling explosion of white spills from its mouth.

With tea cups flying and bowls spinning, the first thing to come to mind when looking at these prints may not be a Japanese tea ceremony, but Manolson invests her subject matter with the same kind of respect and energy that goes into just such a Buddhist ritual. There is new life and understanding in event moment, and in the most mundane of objects. Even dishes will dance and spark you let them, and this artist has.

The Boston Globe
Thusday, July 21, 1994

By Nancy Stapen

Exhibit:

Nine Months

‘Nine Months’: Motherhood as Muse

Summer is the slowest time of the year in the galleries. One word that comes to mind is “barren”. Not at Howard Yezerski’s, though, where a show called “Nine Months: Art and Pregnancy” presents an unusual fertile offering.

Eleven artists from Boston, New York and Los Angeles take diverse approaches to the subject. Media range from the traditional painting, drawing, photography and printmaking to mixed-media construction and sewn objects.

An issue that surfaces repeatedly is the culture’s conflicting attitudes towards pregnancy. Artists here explore the contradictions between the glorified pedestal pregnant women may be placed on, the desexualization of the mother and the sense of the maternal body as communal property – as in those oft-told recitations of pregnant women about the way that complete strangers will approach with advise, even going so far as to touch their stomachs….

Boston artist Ilana Manolson created visual “diaries” during and immediately after her two pregnancies. She represents each day with a small plastic bag filled or adorned with symbolic objects and text. Displayed in a grid, these “excerpts” range from stones arranged like a fertility goddess (apparently not too sublime for Manolson; it’s accompanied by the text: “That awkward stage. No one knows I’m pregnant and my breasts are already twice the size.”), to crossed red and purple gloves each holding an egg, marked with the words “delicate juggle.” All harried new mothers, as well as some new dads, will identify with such postpartum highs of self care as Manolson’s drawing of a shower faucet with the words “It’s a great day – got to dental floss, shower and cut my nails.”

The grid is frequently used motif, perhaps reflecting the search for order in the chaotic world of new motherhood….

The show also includes works by Emily Cheng, Ana Maria Hernando and Aida Laleian. Karl Lundeberg is the only male in the show – a limitation which, according to Yezerski, “created a lot of indignation among male artists, who felt ‘We get pregnant too’”. Organizers Tom Grabosky’s and Natasha Otero-Santiago’s decision to restrict themselves to women artists follows in the tradition of such artists as Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot and Julia Margeret Cameron, who, long before Demi Moore was a glint in Tina Brown’s eye, pioneered the female interpretation of the mother-child relationship.

The Boston Globe
Thursday March 25, 1993

Exhibit:

New Angles on Geometry

From The Boston Globe

In her show of oil paintings and monotypes at the Randall Beck Gallery, Ilana Manolson continues her explorations of geometric forms in space. Previous works depicted cubes and spheres exploding into asymmetrical forms, suggesting degeneration and chaos. This series is more optimistic; the forms seem less driven by frenetic, out-of-control impulses, more in tune with nature's harmony.

The monotypes are especially buoyant. Swiftly applied inks and ghostly impressions lend them an appealing freshness, with spheres whirl}rig through fields of layered color. The surrounding space, punctuated by spirals and concentric circles, evokes ongoing motion. Nature's micro and macro levels are called forth, with suggestions of DNA as well as perpetually mobile galaxies.

The paintings employ a similar format and gold, orange and green palette, but the tones grow darker, and the hard edges of the cubes become, more pronounced. An attempt is made to bring light into the works, by scratching through the layers, but the effort seems labored and the colors muddy. Than Manolson works so will in the difficult medium of monotype – which is, ironically, predisposed to muddiness – suggests that her gifts lie in the direction of the fluid, spontaneous processes.

The Boston Globe
May 9, 1991

Special to the Globe

By Nancy Stapen

Exhibit:

New Angles on Geometry

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE: New angles on geometry

From skyscrapers to the ubiquitous black box, geometric units are such an intrinsic part of our experience, we hardly give them a moment's thought. But these primary organizers of space - in both the natural and manmade worlds - are the traditional building blocks of artists. The minimalism of the '60s, which venerated reduced geometric form at the expense of all embellishment, represents something of an apotheosis of this tendency; it remains a touchstone for many artists today.

In Ilana Manolson's oil paintings, geometric units, which usually symbolize stability, are erupted and imploded. Order, or the lack of it, is the subject here; the word crops up repeatedly in titles such as “Order on the Rebound I”, “Out of Order," etc. Spheres pop out of cubes like crazed jack-in-the-boxes; brushy swirls of paint rushing in and around these forms suggest wind, fire and floods. The palette is a combative mix of fiery yellows and reds and acid greens, underscoring the hyperactive ambience. This is dearly a world where the center no longer holds.

A second series dealing with entropy presents geometric forms at rest. Painted in black and white, they suggest the middle ground between freneticism and inactivity.

Manolson upends our notion of geometry as a soothing, harmonious means of structuring experience. Instead, she offers a formal equivalent for a society veering out of control, where geometric icons of classicism are merely s finger in the darn of cataclysmic chaos and fragmentation.

EXHIBITS : CHANGING WORLDS

Ilana Manolson's art has an unsettled quality: in the past, one of her main subjects has been boxes---captured mid-explosion suggesting the end of a little world. Along with the sense of unease, though, there has been lusciousness to her work, thanks to her handling of paint, pastel and paper, She revels in their tactile qualities, creating a sense of joy akin to that in a child’s finger painting. Manolson's new show offers cubes, pyramids and spheres in stacks that are about to keel over. It's an abstract reflection, the artist says, of the flux and change of her own life.

Gallery, 225 Newbury St., through May 11.

The Boston Globe
November 1988

By Christine Temin
Globe Staff

Exhibit:

When the Roof Blows the Sky's the Limit

PERSPECTIVES

Teasing contradictions about space lurk in liana Manolson's big pastel/collage pieces, at the Randall Beck Gallery, 168 Newbury St-., through October 15. Manolson presents fractured architecture in these new works that are larger and less coy than her earlier ones. She once did charming little paper pieces that depicted exploding boxes; now she's more interested in stairwells, and her work is the more powerful for the shift in scale. She's now capable of creating swirling, hallucinatory spaces, filled with flying staircases that go unanchored to floors: To climb these stairs is to walk the plank.

In the large "Inside/Outlook," Manolson uses overlapping, ragged-edged sheets of paper that spell out shallowness, while a pastel drawing of a steeply descending staircase pulls the viewer into deep space, Manolson's lush colors- here a peach and plum palette - are captivating from across the room, and pull the viewer into a closer inspection of her spatial puzzles.

A less elusive subject than her slippery spaces is the urban dirt and decay that Manolson's new works depict. Smudgy passages are rubbings from real city brick. but here the soot, smoke and grime are transformed into a richly attractive play of textures. A work called "Urban Ruin" unites Manolson's spaces and textures particularly well, with a faint grid, shadows and light all adding drama to the fiat, torn papers that suddenly turn into a vertiginous view of a staircase.

"Writing on the Wall" is a piece of urban archeology, its sense of dirt, age and accumulation built with layer upon layer of shredded flyers and advertisements that could have come from a city fence or telephone pole. "Turning the Corner I" is a com-plete contrast. This work is a pastel without collage elements, and the restraint in the choice of medium helps to create a calm and con-templative air.

HIGHLIGHTS

Exploding houses, endless series of archways and stairways going nowhere are some of Ilana Manolson's favorite images. The spaces In Manolson's large pastel collages are topsy-turvy, with planes slicing into each other with no apparent logic. Adding to the appeal of the work are her luscious, smudgy, gritty colors and her oddly effective combinations of fragments of drawings, rubbed impressions of urban walls and scraped fragments of fliers posted in public areas. Manolson, a young Boston artist, is on sabbatical in New York, but her recent work is at the Randall Beck Gallery on Newbury Street through Oct. 15

Newport Art Museum/Newport
October 1988

Exhibit:

When The Roof Blows The Sky's The Limit

Interior Space:
The 76th American Annual Exhibition

Take a relatively static theme- interior spaces – and put twenty-six unstatic artists to work in a variety of media, and you come up with this lively exhibition. From the ethereal, Hooper-esque interior painting of artists like William Grainge and Marcia Lassar, to the imaginative creativity of such artists as Sandra Pirie, David Judelson and Ilana Manolson, this show succeeds in re-energizing a traditional and somewhat tired subject.

Manolson and Judelson took the spotlight with an exhibition signature piece entitled Both Sides. The artists combined their talents to create a flattened, quirky environment – a European alleyway building – through a series of hinged panels on which the interior and exterior scenes are painted. The piece invites you to explore it inside and out, and from certain vantage points you can look from the outside in to see a series of rooms through a window.

Sandra Pirie, by the way of a cartoonish, flattened room, blown apart, suggests that our interior environment is as fragile as out lives. Her acrylic on foamboard wall hangings attaches checkerboard linoleum to a wall, a ladder and misshapen window; the whole room askew yet strangely neat. The overall effect is strangely semi-surreal and lyrical, suggesting that we might all be living in a carnival funhouse.

Manolson’s similar pastel collage, When the Roof Blows, the Sky’s the Limit, scales life down to a size where you can get a better grip on it. In the humorously quirky piece, she suggests that you never quite know when things might be blown apart, but that fear is more frightening then fact.

The exhibition avoids uniformity with the inclusion of such works as those mentioned above, along with pieces such as John Devaney’s semi-abstracted underwater scene and Joseph Norman’s huge, vertical death dream. But the main force of Interior Scenes emanates from the finely rendered oil paintings of a narrative kind by artists such as Grainge, Bryan Davagian, Jemison Faust, Jacqueline Lima, Suzanne White and others.