FSU’s Former SCAP Manager, Elysia Mann, Exhibits for Year Yellow at 621 in Railroad Square

The Florida State University Department of Art is proud to promote Elysia Mann, former press manager at FSU’s Small Craft Advisory Press, for recognition in Year Yellow (The Year of the Scallop Shell), which indexes 2018 in alphabetic tangles of memoir, observation, and obsession.

Elysia combines drawing, weaving, and poetry into fragmented historical documents. She uses the metaphor of stereoscopic vision to imagine the split-second in which what we witness becomes encoded into what we know. She is blind in one eye. Confusing the singular and plural suggests an alternative way of being in which self and others share definitions. The individual expands and opposites contract. People are uncertain of their boundaries.

Her work embraces doubt as a way of knowing—redundancy as a performance of doubt. With an interdisciplinary approach that includes printmaking, weaving, installation, and poetry, she is interested in repetition, in simultaneous twos, and in redundancy and its power to influence how people view and tolerate contradictions. Areas of uncertainty that repeatedly come into focus include language, time, the body and the body politic. Here, borders are rewritten, data reshuffled. Elysia’s work offers no conclusion nor call to action. Instead, it acts in tentative gestures of unraveling, rejoining. Come to Railroad Square to see how her expansive approach to materials and themes is rooted in the hope that what seems irreconcilable might be—ideally—redundant.