The pinks and greens undulate, beckon. The catalogue of Madison Manning’s Forced Necessary Rest is yarn, glitter, and synthetic hair, all come together to create works that envelope you. They’re difficult to look away from. The longer your eyes linger, the more you see sparkling pearls and hot pink craft feathers.
Forced Necessary Rest is the culmination of Manning’s shift away from sculpture and towards textile after a seizure confronted her with her body’s fallibility and a new paradigm for her life. In their statement for the show, Manning writes, “My work manufactures queer joy even when I have none myself.” The textile and screenprint work in Forced Necessary Rest is joy not out of jubilation and exuberance, but a kind of sharper, rawer joy: The joy that shows up as resistance to suffering. Manning’s work—particularly in Zoom In (With Fringe) and Zoom Out (With Feathers), a pair of fraternal twin paintings that capture her feelings during an epileptic episode, shows how the truest beauty is fragile, but that doesn’t keep it from being strong.
Manning’s work’s influence from the kitsch and the over-the-top femininity of drag is apparent. The glimmer of long nails, the swoosh of hair extensions, the seductive shine of lip gloss—all of those marks of womanhood feel a part of Manning’s work. Manning drew inspiration from growing up in the South, where the ideal of femininity was big, blonde, and sparkly. I saw in their work some of the archetypes of Southern femininity from literature and theater—how often the Southern belle is fragile and afflicted with some unnamed ailment, too beautiful to stand the world, better suited for reclining a chaise in a dimly lit parlor, sipping a glass of brandy and puffing a Virginia Slim than confronting the strenuous monotony of reality.
More often than not, the story of the woman fallen from grace ends with tragedy. Manning’s abstracted femininity imagines if the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper went on to befriend the visions in the walls that haunted her and lived a life on her own terms. (The Yellow Wallpaper is an important source for Manning—two of the show’s paintings have titles that include it). Like Perkins Gilman’s wallpaper, Manning’s textiles can feel overwhelming and all-encompassing—the world a woman falls into when reality becomes unbearable. Maybe there is something to the fact that the waifs and maidens of literary history harbored silent afflictions that weren’t properly understood.
Manning puts their own spin on this interpretation of femininity from the vantage point of a femme, nonbinary lesbian. Their work takes this archetype and frees it from the frozen confines of history. Manning is a living, breathing person who committed to healing, got sober after her seizure, got an adorable service dog to accompany her, and made this portfolio out of their new reality. Her life doesn’t end in the tragic mélange of glitter, perfume, and romantic sadness that female suffering often does. She goes on. She lives, and even thrives.
Manning’s pieces are vulnerable without being confessional—they use no words, and yet the work speaks a secret language of femininity and pain. I lived with intense chronic pelvic pain for several years and the fallibility of the body is something that stays with me eternally. But something that remained with me from that experience is that some physical pain is inexpressible in words. Visual art is one of the few mediums that can access what lies beyond our ability to intellectualize. In Manning’s mesmerizingly ornate color palette, there is a distress and despair visible to those who can relate to her experiences. When I was at my lowest, I wore pink, sparkling eyeshadow, dramatic black cat-eyes, and crimson lipstick with lace skirts and high-heeled boots. Femininity was a way to cope with what I felt my own body had taken from me through my pain.
This dichotomy brings the work thematically back to drag, the blush, the contour, the hairspray, the acrylic nails, the nine-inch heels, the effortless sparkle hiding staggering effort behind it. Among the chaos, Manning finds peace. There’s a frenetic, obsessive quality to every work, but in the cohesive whole of the show, there’s a tentative acceptance that it’s possible to find peace, wellbeing, and even joy in chaos and pain.
Too often, peace is portrayed as a subdued, clean-cut silence; a Puritan-style meditation. Manning shows that sometimes, you need a little glamor and glitter to truly rest.
Madison Manning’s Forced Necessary Rest is on view at Bunker Projects through March 7, 2025, alongside Sophia Marie Pappas’ High & Mighty.
Photography by Anna Brewer Productions
Emma Riva is an art writer based in Pittsburgh. She serves as online editor of TABLE Magazine, a luxury lifestyle brand, where she primarily covers two of humanity’s favorite vices: art and liquor. Her work additionally appears in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Whitehot Magazine, Newcity, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, and YNST. She is a managing editor at UP, an international street art and graffiti magazine, and a masthead writer at Belt Magazine. Emma is also the founder of Petrichor, a web magazine about the Pittsburgh art scene. She won a 2024 Simon Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for excellence in Arts News and Features.
