Why I loved Timothy Manalo’s Show Living, Building, Making
Plasticine casts of Tim Horton’s menu items co-existed with a textile incorporating polypropolene twine, mercerized cotton, acrylic, and merino wool in Act II: Building of Timothy Manalo’s evolving exhibition Living, Building, Making.
I first met multidisciplinary artist Timothy Manalo during a natural dyeing session I was doing at the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-Op. Manalo was sitting at a loom working on a weaving project, and he showed me a few of his other stellar pieces, which incorporated novel materials like colourful polypropylene twine to create vibrant effects.
When Manalo invited me to check out his exhibition project Living, Building, Making at Unit 270, I popped by during the show’s second “act”, Building, and took in its engaging mix of sculpture and textile works. Here, the notion of building meant “world-building”, a concept Manalot weaves – pun intended – into his process-driven practice regularly.
Act III: Making – which ends this evening when Unit 270 closes at 6pm – means place-making; and the first act, Living, hints at the daily activities like those that buzz throughout the surprising spot in which Unit 270 is found: the second floor of the Chinatown Centre in Toronto.
“I want to be mindful of the spaces that I have my shows in,” Manalo says. “And Chinatown Centre, and Chinatown, is a place of convergence for so many different groups of people – immigrants, university students, young professionals. And it’s the immigrant audience that I really thought about with this exhibition. People with different perspectives. I love that artists who show at Unit 270, and its founder Giles [Monette], can engage with that community.”
The exhibition name traces back to when Manalo, who hails from Scarborough, did a summer residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City in 2024. “Living in New York for three months shook me in a way,” he says. “It showed me that what I was doing is okay, and that I needed to lean into it and stop questioning things. And it showed me that to continue to grow as an artist, I have to be living, building, and making it.”
Throughout his work, Manalo incorporates gestures of identity quest and diasporic connectivity in uniquely resonant ways. The sculpture series Whole Combos, which appeared in Act II: Building, features a selection of cast plasticine pieces molded from Tim Horton’s sandwiches. Other foodstuffs, including pizza slices and Scarborough’s defining comestible, the (beef) patty – this time cast in white sugar-laced plaster – appeared in Act I: Living. The sweet addition, Manalo says, points to his Filipino ancestry, and the colonization of the Philippines as part of the sugar trade.
Manalo says that his exploration of trompe l’oeil effects in these works – specifically, his removal of the recognizable colouration from these provisions – came to prompt interesting and unexpected interpretations across viewers. He made the pieces while doing an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. It was during the first Trump administration, and Manalo says that the inspiration for his subject matter struck from a naturally political place.
“I was thinking about alternative forms of protest,” he says, adding that the rampant – and continued – xenophobia in the U.S. eventually conjured images of things like the kind of large family gatherings across immigrant communities that you’d see in places such as Scarborough. “Those gatherings within diasporic communities carry the same sense of unity, of self-determination, of community empowerment, and of self-empowerment.”
Manalo says that from there, he “leaned into food objects” as symbols – ones that speak to the immigrant experience in various ways; the fact that fast food is what feeds many marginalized people who work in service, cleaning and retail jobs, as well as how it represents the supremacy of Western capitalist culture.
Yet for as ubiquitous as many of these food items are, they can stand for entirely different things when only their textural characteristics remain. “Though in Scarborough the beef patty is very emblematic of the Caribbean enclaves there, in Boston, there wasn’t really any context for it,” Manalo recalls. “One of the judges for my Juried Student Exhibition at SMFA at Tufts thought it was an empanada, which in a place like the States would make sense.”
Is it fruit or is it meat? I was captivated by the elements of expository trompe-l’oeil in Act II: Building of Timothy Manalo’s show, Living, Building, Making.
Manalo’s knack for impactful and thought-provoking trickery flowed throughout the works in the second act of Living, Building, Making, most notably in the mesmerizing queues of wax casts of mangoes and chicken breasts pigmented and oil painted in saturated dualling hues of pink and yellow in a series called Familiar, Fiction, Fillet. The shapes recall each and either of the two edible items they’re meant to characterize, sitting under gleaming plastic wrap like they were in the grocery store aisles. And the effect was engrossingly confounding.
Manalo says he and Monette have enjoyed watching the reactions to the de- and re-contextualizing gestures that were central to the two-month show. Act III: Making, relies on textiles for its storytelling, and Manalo notes that the notion of place-making in this instance is connected to the physical body. And of course, the ambitious artist piques our interest once again with the use of unusual materials including human hair.
An intentional sense of intimacy is also evoked in this final chapter, Manalo says; and that concept resonates throughout the Unit 270 project in general. “It’s not a commercial gallery in the traditional sense, where it’s representing artists,” Manalo adds. “There are no clients coming in and out. No viewing rooms. It’s a space for exploring the making of art, and it’s so valuable for artists to have that space to play and experiment. There’s a particular openness and dynamism that exists here.” The same could be said about the shopping mall, and neighbourhood, in which the gallery exists, making it an even more satisfying experience.
