Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA is an extraordinary organisation. Not just a gallery exhibiting works from open calls and solo exhibitions, they are an arts education establishment with a broad and inclusive outlook. It encompasses a Drawing centre that explores and promotes, unusually together, drawing and photography and have a residency program. Also, unusually, they have a prolific publication department producing a huge annual of all the year’s exhibitions, 375 pages for the last one. They also produce, every three years, on a rotating basis an annual of photography, drawing, and painting respectively. The quality of these products is superb.
For the exhibitions all the works are judged in a rigorous blind jury process prioritising quality reducing any curatorial bias or juror prejudice. In the latest season 17 publication there were 41 separate exhibitions of 567 works in total from 319 artists and over 11,000 submissions.
I may be biased as my first engagement with Manifest was being selected for the last Photography Annual, then a year later for the opening round of the season 17 exhibitions and just this year have had two works again selected. It has presented me with an opportunity to showcase some of my work with an affirmation of their quality. I am extremely proud of this especially in the knowledge of their blind jury process.
My work is photography based, often using or abusing different materials and processes. I think that photography in the US is taken more seriously and accepted as an art form. All of the works I have had accepted by Manifest have been submitted in the UK without success.
What I like most about exhibitions is not necessarily seeing my own work, I know it so well, but viewing it in relation with the others on show, appreciating their work and in the context of the exhibition theme.