Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1982, Tony Manson is a self-taught artist who reshapes ephemera and found objects to create layered works of art.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Manson joined the United States Air Force on September 4th, 2001. Following his enlistment, the artist spent 20 years working for private military contractors. During this time, Manson traveled extensively throughout the U.S, Asia, and the Middle East, spending much of his time isolated in vehicles and hotel rooms. This extended isolation led Manson to explore spirituality outside of organized religion and find his inner voice and spiritual guide. In his mid-30s, he began creating songs, poems, and collages. Beginning to sketch at the age of 38 led Manson to an epiphany that creative art was his calling.
Driven by curiosity, Manson explores the past life of objects and imagines how they could find a second purpose. He is drawn especially to discarded ephemeral objects that once played a part in a person’s everyday life, such as cardboard, food product boxes, folders, or plastic wrappings, all of which possess different textures, sheen, colors, and finishes. He seeks to understand how these found objects and materials might work together.
Manson embraces the discomfort and challenges found in working with such non-traditional materials and his chosen undefined creative process. Working in his basement studio, he enters a multi-hour meditation-like session to transform his materials into a finished work of art. His approach—centered on extreme physicality—entails stomping, cutting, shredding, and wetting the material until he feels an emotional sense of completion that has been communicated by the piece. At the center of Manson’s creative process is a “desperation for something beyond guidelines and regulations that have value to each person… an inherent need for human connection.”
