Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present It Doesn’t Have To Make Sense, an exhibition of paintings and sketchbook drawings and thoughts by the artist and author Chella Man, made from 2014 to the present. Growing up in a conservative town in central Pennsylvania–attending schools where creative expression was not prioritized–Man’s first encounter with art making 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—futurebuilding 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.
In the Artist’s Words
I am an artist living as a cyborg, committed to sharing the frameworks I’ve designed upon routinely discarding projected assumptions and binary beliefs. As a Deaf, trans, Chinese, and Jewish artist, language has never granted me full fulfillment. I create visuals and integrative experiences in order to free myself by questioning:
How can I create a space of liberation within a culture that doesn’t believe I am worthy of safety and freedom?
Having been asked my whole life to limit myself, my artistic practice is intentionally expansive—I’m not just a film director, a curator, actor, speaker, author, or a visual artist. Despite the wide variety of mediums I engage with, one grounding question is a constant:
As a Deaf individual, my daily drawing practice taught me that the fluidity of lines can free me from the constraints of language. Within this space of safety and freedom, there was no deprivation, creating control over canvas taught me what abundance could feel like. Continuously curious, my practice has since expanded to include performance, sculpture, film, writing, and installation that address my experiences as a trans, disabled, biracial person. With each artistic output, I grieve and rejoice what a mind and body can and cannot hold. From analyzing the somatic and social impact cochlear implants have held on my life to inviting an audience to witness my live meditation on trans-masculine pregnancy, questioning the values of our world and others in relation to myself powers each piece. Currently, my research explores the hypocrisy of the medical industrial complex and how one can reclaim somatic agency over their body with ink.
At its core, my work welcomes a collective yearning for a unified sense of safety. I believe in the singular power of art to facilitate compassion and communicate experientially rather than prescriptively. It calls on us all to reprioritize empathy for one another in acknowledgement of our individualized capacities and intergenerational healing as we lean into commonalities rather than binary extremes.
Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present It Doesn’t Have To Make Sense, an exhibition of paintings and sketchbook drawings and thoughts by the artist and author Chella Man, made from 2014 to the present. Growing up in a conservative town in central Pennsylvania–attending schools where creative expression was not prioritized–Man’s first encounter with art making 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—futurebuilding 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.
In the Artist’s Words
I am an artist living as a cyborg, committed to sharing the frameworks I’ve designed upon routinely discarding projected assumptions and binary beliefs. As a Deaf, trans, Chinese, and Jewish artist, language has never granted me full fulfillment. I create visuals and integrative experiences in order to free myself by questioning:
How can I create a space of liberation within a culture that doesn’t believe I am worthy of safety and freedom?
Having been asked my whole life to limit myself, my artistic practice is intentionally expansive—I’m not just a film director, a curator, actor, speaker, author, or a visual artist. Despite the wide variety of mediums I engage with, one grounding question is a constant:
As a Deaf individual, my daily drawing practice taught me that the fluidity of lines can free me from the constraints of language. Within this space of safety and freedom, there was no deprivation, creating control over canvas taught me what abundance could feel like. Continuously curious, my practice has since expanded to include performance, sculpture, film, writing, and installation that address my experiences as a trans, disabled, biracial person. With each artistic output, I grieve and rejoice what a mind and body can and cannot hold. From analyzing the somatic and social impact cochlear implants have held on my life to inviting an audience to witness my live meditation on trans-masculine pregnancy, questioning the values of our world and others in relation to myself powers each piece. Currently, my research explores the hypocrisy of the medical industrial complex and how one can reclaim somatic agency over their body with ink.
At its core, my work welcomes a collective yearning for a unified sense of safety. I believe in the singular power of art to facilitate compassion and communicate experientially rather than prescriptively. It calls on us all to reprioritize empathy for one another in acknowledgement of our individualized capacities and intergenerational healing as we lean into commonalities rather than binary extremes.
