“HEAVEN ON EARTH: IMPERIALISTIC EVOLUTION OF THE CORPORATE WORLD,” A SOLO EXHIBITION OF NEW WORK BY ARTIST MANFRED MENZ, IS EXTENDED THROUGH AUGUST 31 AT CMAY GALLERY
ART CRITIC AND WRITER SHANA NYS DAMBROT WILL LEAD AN ARTIST WALK-THROUGH AND TALK
WITH MENZ ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 2-4pm
With his new solo exhibition at CMay Gallery – “Heaven on Earth: Imperialistic Evolution of the Corporate World” – artist Manfred Menz manipulates mundane cloudscapes into new frontiers for pervasive corporate advertising. Menz imagines a future that is most surely almost upon us, something he’s been told by technology professionals when discussing his work. That topic will certainly be part of the conversation at an artist’s walkthrough and talk with Menz led by art critic Shana Nys Dambrot on Saturday, August 24, 2-4PM.
In her recent essay for the exhibition, Dambrot writes: “Manfred Menz is a conceptualist, an artist for whom ideas from the socioeconomic and political realms take primacy, but who nevertheless feels compelled to give them substantial physical expression…His newest body of work is a suite of photographs….about the pernicious intrusiveness and low-key mind control perpetrated by the corporations that rule the world, even above and beyond governments.” She concludes, “’Heaven on Earth’ itself, posits the cheerful invasion of an array of familiar brand logos, covering all aspects of our consumer lives from food to technology. Like a shower of candy, like a heavenly host of angels, like the legions of tiny buddhist spirit guides flying in on lotuses in the world of ukiyo-e — this central image redefines cloud-seeding. The weather is changed, and new generations will from this point on live and die have never known a world without these messages. Is a world where the clouds themselves become billboards really so hard to imagine? Satire is at its best, when it’s hard to be certain what is fake, because the real is already so strange to begin with.”
The seeming innocuousness of Menz’s satire is underscored by the fact that the work isn’t glossy, it doesn’t carry itself with the bearings of heroic labor. It has a plainness that allows us to process it as familiar despite its surrealism. On the other, more insidious hand, corporate advertising is so codified that these photo-manipulations are funny compared to the sleek, clever ways we have been advertised to for decades. Menz’s works are a warning of things to come from the malignant growth of corporate culture and our complacency watching it float by on our screens. Our deepest desires, and indeed our reality, have been hacked.
Image at top:
“Heaven on Earth,” Manfred Menz
https://cmaygallery.com/heaven-on-earth.html/
