Dean Manning: Midgets and Giants

Overview

Dean Manning, formerly of Leonardo's Bride, and currently singing with Angie Hart in Holidays on Ice, has a big artistic side, with a style somewhere near early British colonial art and Sidney Nolan. Growing up around travelling side-shows, Manning very quickly learned to look at the downscale behind the small glamours of the carnivalesque. His new exhibition at the Damien Minton Gallery, Midgets and Giants, feels a little like a look behind the curtain of everyday life —  a traffic light hangs solo in a light blue sky like Norman Rockwell visiting Twin Peaks, or a trio of Mariachi settle into sweatless cacophony and marry their calm with a glitzy exterior.

Lived-in wastelands of westerns, farms or urban quiet make up the theme of an exhibition drawn in gentle, solid colours. Paitings split Australian or Latin life into multi-panelled stories, dividing life into discrete and silent parts. In another image, Tilly Devine stands among a sea of criminals and newsprint, alert and reticent. Manning's art is unassuming, but it will lure you in for a closer look. Make sure not to miss it before it moves on to its next engagment.

Image by Dean Manning.