Gone, Country
Embroidery & Writing by Jackie Mantey

OPENING EXHIBITION: Saturday, September 1, Performances at 8:00 PM, doors at 7:30 PM.

Jackie Mantey is a multimedia artist and writer who lives in Chicago. She embroiders on black and white images selected from the public domain of the New York Public Library Digital Collection.The photographs used as source material for the exhibition Gone, Country were search results for the words “Home,” “Ohio,” “Chicago,” “Local,” or “Native.”

Raised on a now-shuttered dairy farm in Ohio, Mantey makes and writes work that explores America’s contemporary rural/urban divide, a division highlighted and exacerbated by the corrosive dialogue of the 2016 presidential election. Her embroidery on top of these historical images creates visual cues that warp the story of the original image. The resulting work is at once playful and unsettling, witnessed through the plastic lens of modern America, as well as our individual experiences of isolation as we struggle culturally with a national identity crisis—a national identity crisis that has been a long time coming. As progress continues to polarize traditionally privileged communities, a look back at American history tells a more nuanced story.

Presented alongside each image title in Gone, Country is the original name of the historical photograph. The language and terminology used in these original titles is important. Whose portraits have names deemed worthy enough to record? What locations and homes have been recorded for posterity? How did Americans think of and name other Americans? What was recorded and what wasn’t? What visuals are provided, by fate and algorithms, as answers to a search?
Mantey leans into these questions when rewriting each image’s story with needle and thread. Throughout the exhibition are evocations of both rural and city life; their traditions, aesthetic, and people; their similarities and power-sanctioned differences; and the things our country has taken, given, or brutally left behind. Each image is framed in repurposed barn wood that was
torn down as America’s landscape changes.

At its core, Gone, Country is one American country-girl-cum-city-woman’s search for a place to land and effort to bridge an identity inspired by seemingly opposed forces.

jackiemantey.com // Instagram: @jackiemantey

Jackie Mantey lives in Chicago. She is an award-winning copywriter and journalist by day job(s), who makes embroidery artwork to complement her creative writing by night/ weekends/ lunch
breaks/ etc. Jackie and her husband, standup comedian Justin Golak, co-host the entertainment podcast A Feminist & A Comedian Walk Into a Bar, and she writes about travel, pop culture, reading, writing, the gig life, sobriety, modern womanhood, #auntingsohard, the human freaking condition, the kitchen sink, and more on her website, jackiemantey.com.

$5 Suggested donation – All donations go directly to the artist

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Tags: Chicago, Gone Country, Humboldt Park, Illinois, Jackie Mantey, Slate Arts and Performance