Chella Man. It Doesn’t Have To Make Sense

About

Growing up in a conservative town in central Pennsylvania–attending schools where creative expression was not prioritized–Man’s first encounter with artmaking was through the pen and paper on his desk. Before Man had the language to articulate his experience of living as a disabled, queer, person of color, drawing became a fluid vocabulary that gave voice to the confusion, abstraction, intuition, identity, and self-love he was, and continues to be, in pursuit of.

From a young age, Man’s drawings have always been composed in black ink—bold, breathing lines that conjure connections to the Chinese calligraphy his grandfather created throughout his life. Never making a plan before embarking on a blank page, he celebrates the intimacy small-scale sketchbooks offer, encouraging his line to wander and intersect freely as he connects thoughts, figures, and shadows. That he discovers infinite possibilities for expression in the simplicity of black and white composition speaks to his ability to recognize multitudes in binary systems. For Man, the dynamic and amorphous space beyond binaries is a continuum. His line does not measure or mimic, but manifests its own course, snaking about the page with an independence that makes it impossible to comprehend where his drawing begins and ends.

Throughout his life, Man has continued to make images that speak and words that shape. Prioritizing how his work resonates personally, he refuses to succumb to external pressures to clarify his intentions or to make his work palatable to audiences with prejudiced notions of concept and technique. On every page, he evokes a catharsis that preceded the language and community he found, and surrounds himself with to this day. His is a practice that, with age and wisdom, only continues to accumulate potential—future-building line by line. In meditating on his place in the continuum of gender, race, sexuality, disability, morality, and ethics, Man understands his creative practice as a generative space to envision a cultural landscape where he doesn’t have to strive for what is “in between,” but, more expansively, can seek what is beyond.