
The New York Times, Thursday October 14, 2012 national edition Southern California (front page)
2017
This intimate work on newsprint presents a quietly radical proposition, taking the front page of a specific edition of The New York Times and rendering it through inkjet printing as a relic of suspended time. Dashiell Manley's practice centers on the charged relationship between image and text as carriers of cultural anxiety, and here that concern finds one of its most precise expressions. The newsprint substrate is not incidental but essential, collapsing the distance between the work's source material and its new identity as a contemplated object. What was once ephemeral, disposable, consumed in minutes, is transformed into something that invites sustained looking. Manley's paintings and works on paper have drawn significant critical attention for the way they hold journalistic imagery at arm's length, allowing the viewer to register the formal and emotional residue of mass media without being absorbed by its content. This 2017 piece, referencing a 2012 edition distributed across Southern California, introduces a deliberate temporal gap that is central to its meaning. The specificity of the date, the regional designation, the edition type, all of this metadata functions as both title and content, foregrounding the work's interest in how news is archived, regionalized, and ultimately forgotten. The relatively modest dimensions, just over thirty by thirty-eight centimeters, give the piece an almost documentary intimacy. Signed by the artist and currently held at The FLAG Art Foundation, this work would suit a collector drawn to conceptually rigorous practice that engages media history and memory without aesthetic grandstanding. It sits comfortably alongside works by artists who treat the newspaper as cultural artifact, yet remains distinctly Manley's own in its restraint and precision.
- Medium
- Inkjet on newsprint
- Overall
- Signed
- Yes
- Location
- The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY
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