Michelle Mantsio
(b. 1974, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)
Michelle Mantsio works across video, installation, textiles and performance. Her work is research-based and often involves interviews and fieldwork that structure or inform the final outcome. She also explores how people respond to their environment through art and design. In previous work she has drawn on film stills from Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) and David Lynch’s Wild At Heart (1990), using their colours and shapes to structure textile-based, moveable sculptures and a floor drawing. Inspired by John Hillcoat’s 1981 film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, she has also made work about imagined or re-mapped spaces, taking inspiration from the dimensions of a standard prison cell as a metaphor for the tensions of containment and constraint, and the role of the imagination in transcending these environments.
Mantsio’s latest film, Ner Did It, 2023, focuses on Ner, the imaginary friend of the artist’s nephew. Mantsio is interested in connecting with the unfettered expression and imaginative freedom that children seem to naturally muster. Exploring ‘playacting’ as a theoretical basis for the work, Ner Did It offers a filmic portrait of multiple selves through several evocations of inner lives and interior spaces.
Mantsio is a lecturer at RMIT University’s Department of Interior Design and holds a Master of Fine Art and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from RMIT University. As an artist, designer and writer, she has participated in numerous residencies, including Room to Create (City of Yarra, Melbourne); Body as Site (Banff Centre, Canada); Body Research (Goldsmiths University, London); To Note: Notations Across Disciplines, with Hannah Matthews (RMIT University, Melbourne); Textiles Research (Benaki MusuemMuseum, Greece); Sense Lab (Hexagram, Montreal,); and Future Academy, with Clémentine Clementine Deliss (Melbourne, Tokyo, Yamaguchi, Kassel and Patras).
Mantsio has performed and exhibited in Australia and overseas, including at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne), Yellow Brick (Greece), Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Japan), and RAAR (Rotterdam, the Netherlands). She has exhibited at Documenta 12 magazines (Kassel, Germany), La Trobe Art Institute (Melbourne), Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), West Space (Melbourne), Mildura Palimpsest (Mildura), Melbourne Design Week for NowHaus (Melbourne), Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival (Melbourne), Seventh Gallery (Melbourne), Orgy Park (New York), Wangaratta Art Gallery (Wangaratta), and Index Art Center (Newark, New Jersey). She is a member of research group the Kinomatics Project.
Ner Did It appeared in Community Hall on 7–13 Aug 2023.
Film credits
Ner Did It, 2023, Single Channel Video © Michelle Mantsio