Mandy Greer
Mandy Greer is a sculptor and mixed-media installation artist with an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington, where she held a Jacob K. Javitz National Graduate Fellowship. Mandy received a BFA in ceramics and a BA in English from the University of Georgia and went Phi Beta Kappa.
In Washington, she has shown her work at Bellevue Arts Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Kirkland Arts Center; and in Seattle at The Henry Gallery, 4Culture Gallery, Soil Gallery, Consolidated Works and Priceless Works Gallery. She has also shown at the Tampa Museum of Art, FL.
Her work is included in the books The Best of New Ceramic Art (1997), Fashion is Art (2003), as well as Soil Gallery, 10 Years (2005). Mandy’s work is featured in the video Creatures.
She received a 4Culture Special Projects Grant (Seattle) and an Artist Trust Fellowship (Seattle) in 2004. In 2006, Mandy completed a commission of a permanent installation for the Children’s Center in the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library as part of the “Library Unbound” series.
She was also featured in a 4-person show in San Francisco at The Lab, in 2006. Her most recent body of work was an installation for the Bumbershoot Arts Festival 2006, Seattle, funded by a grant from 4 Culture and a City Artists Grant from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, which was also seen at Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle.
In February 2007, Mandy made a debut in theatrical design with Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre’s production of A Tale of Two Cities. In 2008, she will have a solo show at Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington.
Mandy’s work presents her own elusive interior narratives remade into archetypal tales. These “fairy” tales transcend the personal by mimicking theatrical illusions and tapping into a collective mythology of imagery. By using animal and hybridized forms made up of the flotsam and jetsam of the thriftstore domestic, Greer shoves the viewer into a vivid yet sometimes inexplicable world with the meaning always on the tip of one’s tongue. Her installations attempt to wrap around and contain many paradoxes; the collusion of homeliness and glitz, hunger and indulgence, love and violence, the decorative and the meaningful, the diligence of the handmade and slovenliness of the animal realm. Every surface and stitch is laced with the hope that exhaustive labor holds the promise of the transformative power of Spectacle.