Donato Mancini
Donato Mancini
Title: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goth Phase)
Medium: Screenprint on Stonehenge
Dimensions: 22” x 30”
Market Value: $600
Date of Production: 2009
Artist’s Comments:
This ongoing series is of screenprints originate in my book Æthel (New Star, 2007). In Æthel I first explored in depth my interest in the psychology of advertising, design vernaculars and the gaps between verbal and visual forms of literacy. My procedure is to expand and mutate the alphabets of select display fonts that are common feature of the urban visual landscape. The shift from small-format black and white book page to large format screen prints allows me to deploy resources of colour and scale to greater effect. Here a long tradition of concrete/visual poetry comes into dialogue with the legacies of abstract and text-based conceptual art. I draw from the work of such figures as Michael Morris, Ray Johnson, Steve McCaffrey, Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner, as refracted through my readings of the most current developments in contemporary art, poetry and poetics today.
Bio:
The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on bookworks, poetry, and text-based visual art. His two books of procedural and visual writing, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007) were both nominated for the ReLit Award. His collaborative visual works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia and Cuba. Notable exhibitions include Surveillance Sketch (Artspeak, Vancouver 2003) and Untitled: Conversation Loops (The Western Front, 2004). He also co-directed the world’s first genuine in-world avatar documentary AVATARA (Centre A, Vancouver 2003), now part of the UbuWeb international archive of experimental film and video. Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he was a principal organiser of the interdisciplinary N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium in August 2008. His third collection of poetry and visual works Buffet World, is due from New Star Books in 2010. Other exhibitions and publications forthcoming include a book edition from Fillip (Vancouver), an artist’s book from Book Thug (Toronto), as well as writing in publications such as The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Rampike, W, The West Wind Review, Parser and ditch. The work at auction is from the group exhibition Angels in the Angles at (Gallery Atsui, Vancouver 2009), conceived and curated by Steve Calvert, also featuring work by Marina Roy and Christian Bök.
