Courtney McManus

Artists Statement:  After Sunday

             This body of work, entitled After Sunday, is a result of numerous personal catalysts in the form of internal realization.  I was beginning to feel a certain awkwardness about where I was in life. This seemed to be exacerbated by a number of just as awkward, and in some ways, almost painful changes I suddenly realized I was going through. Many of these changes revolved around feminine roles and my unwitting acceptance there of.  I had begun to dress and behave outside of what I used to consider characteristic or normal for myself.  The things I once shunned were now an integral part of my daily routine, and I had no idea how this had happened.  These were retroactive realizations however, making them all the more painful and difficult for me to deal with.  They were about objects, transitions, and changes that I could not quite pin point the time they had crept into the periphery of my life.  They had slid in unnoticed, unknowingly.  To deal with these issues, I chose to re-visit the moment of my awareness of the change, in an attempt to resolve my anxieties about it. I wanted to document my eerie moments of self-awareness regarding these objects and transitions.  After Sunday attempts to reconcile and document the moment of realization with the change or object in question.

            This series is based around sets of images incorporating text, which narrate my personal moment of revelation.  Each image is a six-inch square, butted directly up against its “partner.”  The square format, to me, is a more personal format, but also a confined and structured setting.  I felt this personal format juxtaposed with the idea of a confined and structured setting best interpreted my inner feelings of frustration, confusion, and rage at the situation. I use the image sets with their corresponding text to set up a dichotomy of sorts, placing my emotions and reactions with their original triggers at the moment of realization.  Individually, each image means nothing, and the text could mean anything, but all together, it forms a cohesive illustration of sorts for a specific moment in my life.  A moment of realization, and, in a way, a moment of acceptance.  The narration itself is taken from my own thoughts and journaling; my pattern of speech and writing can be very distinct. It is my hope that when reading the text, the images not only made perfect sense jointly, with one informing the other, but that the reader can hear me speaking in their minds.

Biography

Courtney Elizabeth Mc Manus was born December 21^st, 1983 in Toledo, Ohio, but grew up in the Dayton, Ohio suburb of Beavercreek.  She was interested in art from an early age, and has said that her first art related memory was finger painting in her bedroom one afternoon after her parents had told her not to do so.  While in high school, she participated in multiple creative writing and photography courses, as well as the performing art of Color Guard.  It was photography, however that truly caught her attention, and when it came time to go away to college, she attended Ball State University in 2002, where she majored in photography.  Courtney had a rough first year, and at the end of the year, transferred to the University of Toledo as a New Media major.  It was not until this time that she really found herself and became comfortable as an artist.  At this time, Courtney is still living and working in Toledo, and hopes to graduate from UT in the spring of 2008.