About S. Billie Mandle

S. Billie Mandle creates photographs that are graphic and subtle, minimal and gritty, void of a figure, yet full of presence. The artist wields the quiet nature of the photographic media to translate the energy of place. Mandle recognizes the authoritative nature of photography, yet chooses to engage its complimentary capacities of humility and unknowing; “I am drawn to the tension in photography between the indexicality of its process and the mutability of an image’s meaning.  Photography is an entry point for questioning what we see and how we know,” Mandle writes of her work. Psychological underpinnings unite such seemingly disparate subjects as Catholic confessionals, light in the corner of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, parking lots without directional markings, the gardens of cooperative homes washed by a color field sampled from medical supplies, or the walls of refugee shelters, hospitals and nursing homes.

Reconciliation

Mandle achieves aesthetics that slow down time, somehow compressing many instants into a single frame that feels both painterly and sculptural. The baggage of time and presence is ever palpable. Mandle will draw our attention to history of place through light, but more often through evidence of marks, ware patterns, stains, or graffiti. However achieved, it is this attention to the evidential void that haunts us. A knowing someone, now no one looms with the promise for materialization. In this emotion- something unexpected happens. These works somehow cause us to embody the emotion of place- as if we become the energy these spaces manifest or at least come into contact with it physically. We feel transitory- at once certain and uncertain, grounded and yet suspended. Mandle’s is a smart and conceptual approach. A deep-dive into each project has unique resonance and reward. Each work a doorway to emotion and starting point for contemplation.

Stellar Skytron

The subject of these photographs is more emotional than objective. These are the lights under which the artist gave birth to her son. An experience where one body became two.

“Giving birth — becoming a mother — was an extraordinary experience but it was also painful, frightening, and confusing. . . I want to give my son, and the viewer, the capacity for both darkness and light.”

The power of the photographs is heightened when experienced in sequence. Thus, Skeller Skytron exists as a hand-assembled accordion book. The artist’s photobook was published by Dust Collective and featured in Collector Daily.

Circumference

Circumference captures light in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom.  Mandle returned time and again to make photographs that might invite the same sort of deep contemplation as the poet who wrote there.  This work is a meditation on how vast journeys can be made within the space of one’s own mind. Mysterious and charged, the artist's use of framing aids us our ability to identify this as the same physical place, but certainly not the same emotional or psychological one. Nothing is ever the same twice.  Through repetition Mandle’s Circumference proofs how attention to nuance might lift the veil on expansiveness.  

We first included work from Mandle’s Circumference series in an online exhibition You and Yours; these works were later brought off-line and included in our 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition : Time in two directions.

Blue Ground

Dark Background

S. Billie Mandle received a BA in biology and English from Williams College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has exhibited at The Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA), Hyères Photography Festival (France), and Garden (Los Angeles, CA) and been awarded grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. Her work has been featured in Cabinet, Aperture, Collector Daily, Lenscratch, Wired, and beyond. Her monograph, Reconciliation, was published in 2020. She is an associate professor of photography at MassArt.