Every Angel Is Terrifying: a Mind-bending Exhibition by Shayna Strype and Dane Manary

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Every Angel Is Terrifying is a multimedia installation by Dane Manary and Shayna Strype that brings together kinetic sculptures with projected animation, video, photography, and early optical illusions, including Pepper’s Ghost, to explore what exists just beyond the edges of perception. The exhibition takes its title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’, in which the “terrifying” angel suggests a magnitude of existence so immense that direct contact with it would exceed the limits of human understanding. Instead of looking up in terror, the work turns towards the tactile, the practical, and the miniature in an attempt to give earthly form to that which is beyond consciousness. Drawing on the tradition of paper dollhouses as an accessible form of miniature world-building, the exhibition extends that tradition by constructing an imagined space on a life-size scale. The installation centers process, practical effects, and materiality, using an archive of objects, paper ephemera, video, and photographs to create a plane visited by angels and apparitions. Every Angel Is Terrifying marks the artists’ first installation-based collaboration, bringing together Manary’s practices in photography and bookmaking with Strype’s work in animation and performance. OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, October 9, 6-9pm ON VIEW: October 9 - October 24 GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 1-6pm