MANNY PRIERES

b. 1972, Spain

Remnants, No. 4, 2010

Graphite on paper
12 x 9 in.

Collection of The Bass
Gift of Cricket and Martin Taplin
t.1.2012

Cuban American artist Manny Prieres addresses the influence of mass communications mostly in the obsolescence of print due to digital media. In exploring his interest in the ‘death of print’, Prieres uses traditional methods of drawing and painting, replacing advanced technological processes with the hand, to create a form of serial production where the final outcome is a nonsensical remnant of the original source.

Remnants are graphite-on-paper works depicting scissors, knives, and other tools peasants used in their daily lives and in the war against Spain. Prieres describes the remnants to be a sort of trace left behind from a collision, as “a trail of residue that marks the site where violence took place,” each containing elements from multiple sources that bring up tales from Prieres personal history, colliding traditional heritage with a more anomalous counterculture in which a series of new artifacts are created. The outcome now represents a new folklore, an iconography of a new tradition.