About

About me…It’s in the third-person, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I did write it…

Mandy Greer is a sculptor & mixed-media installation artist with an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington (99’), 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 (96’) and went Phi Beta Kappa.  In Washington, she has shown her work at The Bellevue Art Museum, The Tacoma Art Museum, The 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 and Bucheon Gallery in SF.  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” from http://www.muchacreative.com.  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 featured in a 4-person show in San Francisco at The Lab, in 2006. Also in 2006 she had a room-sized installation at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, 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 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 Mandy had her first solo museum show at the Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington, debuting her largest installation to date, ‘Dare alla Luce’, along with a survey of her work from the past decade, supported in part by a 2007 4Culture Special Projects Grant and 2008 Artist Trust GAP grant.  A full-color catalogue accompanied the exhibition.  She was also nominated for the Portland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Northwest Artist Awards for 2008.  In 2009, ‘Dare alla Luce’ traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in Portland, Or.  Her current projects are about blending community, installation, performance and collaboration, including the “Silvering Path” — featured on the cover of the May 2009 issue of Fiberarts, and “Mater Matrix Mother and Medium” – a temporary public art experience  commissioned by Seattle Public Utilities during summer 2009.

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.

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