Least I Struggle Painting

Kandace Manning’s art explores humankind’s relationship with the natural environment and our perception of that environment. Her art practice is rooted in her interactions with nature and a desire to derive beauty from everyday experiences with the elements. Her work explores the emotional impact of formal elements and their effect on the subjective human experience, and is an organic oscillation between theory and praxis where media follows concept. This has led her into papermaking, painting, digital photography, and mixed media sculpture. Striving to express the truest nature of the media at hand, Kandace allows the media to engage the concept in an organic dialogue with an aim to let the media speak in an effortless language. Her work exists in a dichotomy between the media, (whether it be paper, paint or wood), and its just being, just existing, in a life of its own, while simultaneously expressing the tactile will of the artist’s hand. Kandace Manning studied at The Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, where she graduated in 2010, with a Bachelor of Fine Art. Her artwork is in multiple private collections and has been shown in multiple galleries including Imogen Gallery (Astoria, OR), Barrister’s Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Museum of People’s Art (Bay City, OR), Shoreline City Hall and Modern Glaze (Shoreline, WA).