Ross Manning is a visual artist and musician who stages spatial interventions using everyday objects: fluorescent tubes, ceiling fans, household twine, brown wrapping paper, analogue overhead projectors and detritus from discontinued data projectors. Manning started creating kinetic sculptures specifically for their sonic potential, into which environmental influences were often incorporated. From soundwaves to light waves, Manning has an uncanny ability to foreground the hidden beauty in audiovisual technology, an exploration helped by the practical experiences of his previous job as a gallery installer and repair technician. Manning has a long dialogue with sound art in the Australian scene operating under projects such as 4 Layers Of Nine, and in Brisbane noise duo Faber Castell (with Alan Nguyen), and more recently with Sky Needle (with Joel Stern, Alex Cuffe and Sarah Byrne) - a conceptual rock band from Australia performing primitive hypnotic music played on built instruments. Utilising broken electronics, hand made instruments, custom electronics and electro-magnetic recordings, Manning has an uncanny ability to slice open new parts of sound and light spectrums, revealing both frenzied and sublime textures. Ross Manning’s album Interlacing is released on Australian label Room40.
“Manning’s work threatens to lift the veil from the fetishised consumer electronics on which we are dependent, subtly repositioning the technologies that operate as the unseen ‘given’ in our daily lives. In place of the corporate software-hardware standards that are now so normative as to be effectively coercive, we are presented with a quiet unworking - an alternative emotion of objects. What is highlighted, throughout Manning’s work, is the ongoing, unresolved question about the dynamics of power between technology and contemporary life.” - Danni Zuvela, Milani Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2012
“Ross Manning is one of Australia’s best kept secrets.” - Room40, 2015
