Chad Manley Takes Design Across the Border into Art
Asked if he calls himself a designer or an artist, Chad Manley laughed. “Oooh, that’s gray ground,” he said. Manley, whose studio is in Taos, grew up in Pecos, studied art, got out of school and made sculpture for about eight years. And never sold a thing, he said. “My work at that time was a little more risky. Plus, I was using found objects a lot. I think maybe I wasn’t really ready to succeed.”
He’s succeeding now. A new show of his art and furniture opens today at URSA, on south Guadalupe Street. “PUNKT” is an exhibition of innovations and assemblages. The show seems to go back and forth between inspirations — detailing on hot rods and low-riders or, well, Swiss cheese.
For Manley, this collection is “all about color, architecture, space and blurring the lines of art and design.” For the steel and mahogany table titled “Zro” and the wall sculpture called “Izz,” he coated the steel with pigmented shellac, ground back through the layers and chemically rusted the metal, which created a fantastical, chocolate-candy-like composition. On “Wolk,” one of the Swiss cheese-inspired works, Manley played with concave and convex half-dome forms until they morphed into almost lifelike functional sculpture.
“For me, design employed all the same tools as art, but once I tried it, it worked,” Manley told the Journal. “The difference is, design has function, which sometimes really helps the process. Those constraints are sometimes liberating. They make it easier to make sculpture. You don’t end up buried in your own work.
“I’m having perfect fun doing that diversified problem-solving. Two or three years ago when I was with Tadu Gallery — maybe after a few glasses of wine — I said, ‘I should do a show where I do all the furniture and all the wall art.’ And Ted Skoglund said, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea!’ So I had to do it.”
The show was “a raging success,” he said. The little red dots were everywhere. “The art sold the furniture and the furniture sold the art. One was R&D for the other,” Manley said.
“Now I don’t need the art; it’s just fun. In my work, so much of what falls away when I’m making something gets used in something else. I use those negative shapes.”
When he was looking for a gallery after Tadu closed, “URSA was absolutely our first, first choice. I couldn’t imagine a better fit,” Manley said. “It is big spaces, clean, minimal, contemporary. And the staff is great. That makes all the difference in the world.
“I do plan my shows,” Manley added. “In that way I’m much more a designer than an artist. At URSA, they are not daunted by scale, which is lovely. For this show, I designed an eight-foot-round piece of steel that’s 1.5 inches thick — that’s huge.”
Sometimes his imagination creates new problems to solve. “I have a spinner table that I built for this show; it’s geared and everything. I made a substrate of mediumdensity fiberboard and thought, ‘What if we put it offcenter by two feet?’ It was a colossal, off-center, swinging disk. I had to build a scaffold to paint it, and then I had to worry about not passing out with the repetitive motion. I thought of ballet dancers, how they spot their sight. I had to keep part of my eye on the airbrush to avoid motion sickness or dizziness with the swing of the disk.”
Manley’s wife, Juniper, is an integral part of his work, he said. “This is a sham democracy. I take credit for everything and I owe her so much. She’s not only my sounding board over coffee in the morning, but she runs the whole business. It just happens that before we met, I already had a name. But I’m constantly playing with a new design logo — maybe Manley and Manley? We also have people who work for us. I don’t have the only decision in the creative process. I have the ultimate veto, but I’ve been voted down.”
All in all, Manley said, he’s found freedom in thinking of himself as more designer than artist. “Not feeling precious about your ideas is very liberating,” he said. “There are just more identity issues when you think of yourself as an artist. As a designer, it’s not so concept-precious and you can just go with the flow.”
If You Go
WHAT: “PUNKT: Art and Furniture” by Chad Manley
WHEN: Today through May 4; reception 5-7 p.m. today.
WHERE: URSA, 550 S. Guadalupe St. at the Railyard
CONTACT: (505) 986-1221
