DS Mangus

Squares are ubiquitous in the built environment. Examples are all around us: buttons, drains, hatches, signs, and vents, to name a few. In fact, the screen you’re looking at right now is composed of tiny square units called pixels, from “pic-el” or “picture element.” The Square Project consists of site-specific square-sets arranged in a 3 x 3 format, recalling the gridiron street layouts in which they were found.

The square also represents time, with its four equal sides suggesting the seasons; and in the form of the calendar, which demarcates days of the week into a grid of squares. In 2016, I made calendars based on my square series and mailed them out as holiday gifts to colleagues, family members, and friends. Included in the square mailers were 16 square photographs representing the 12 months and 4 seasons. Four years later, I made Square Calendar #2.

In late 2019, I began making collages out of the piles of materials accumulated around my workspace: old magazines, scraps, and tape; train ticket stubs and city maps; cork board remnants and deflated balloons. Sometimes I find things in the park. After collecting these found images or materials, I compose them onto square panels, around a grid. But the grid gets lost as the layers pile up. What remains are hybrid pictures, part abstract, part representational.

I recently began making photomontages of buildings in ruin, examples of which can be found throughout Baltimore. This project is an extension of my Constructions series, but focuses on the deterioration of buildings rather than their creation. In 2019, I was granted access to a demolition site on the Johns Hopkins medical campus to document its methodical process (the building is now completely gone); and I began exploring the Johnston Square neighborhood of Baltimore, taking photos of the many abandoned buildings there.

I am deeply inspired by the built environment in which I live and work. My Constructions series illustrates this well. For this series of photomontages, I locate buildings under construction and take multiple shots across their façades, sometimes revisiting the site several times over the course of its development. I later re-construct the multiple shots (and shoots) into one larger composite image.

Dereck Stafford Mangus is a Baltimore-based visual artist and writer. His artwork has been exhibited in select galleries throughout Charm City, including Atlas Fine Arts, Maryland Art Place, the Peale Center for Baltimore History & Architecture, and elsewhere. His visual work was most recently featured in the intimate group exhibition Constructed at Full Circle Gallery.

Over the past few years, recognition for his written compositions has included an Honorable Mention from the esteemed Philadelphia independent arts journal Artblog, and selection for publication in Full Bleed, the annual journal of art and design at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In 2018, he won the prestigious Frieze Writer’s Prize for his review of a major exhibition celebrating Black artist Jack Whitten. Mangus holds an MLA in Visual Arts from Harvard and an MA in Critical Studies from MICA.

While looking out the window as a child, I would pass the time alternating my focus between the mesh of the window screen and the world beyond. Years later, while photographing a small chair by a seaside cliff, I decided to capture it through a screen door, which resulted in a more abstract image. I am interested in the liminal space between abstraction and representation.

Like the façade of a building, a person's face alters over time; it cracks and fades with age. Some faces age with grace and beauty like ancient architecture. Others do not. When people pose for a photograph, they freeze and, standing perfectly still, stare into the camera's lens: the eyes are the windows to the soul. People and buildings are constantly in flux and have multiple levels of meaning. Some are simple, others more complex. Some faces and buildings have intriguing histories. But every face has a story to tell.

As a designer, I have enjoyed working with many types of organizations, from smaller, more independent publications such as Artblog, to The Boston Globe. Aside from simply being learning experiences, many of my favorite positions were those that cultivated comfort and energy within a collaborative, fast-paced environment, where I excelled in conceptualizing projects through to their final production.

In 2020, I launched the Bounty Label Project. By tweaking the Bounty brand paper towel logo to say “Donny” and updating the tagline (from the iconic jingle) to read “The Guilty Stripper Picker Upper,” I made a pun about President Donald Trump who was impeached earlier in the year and was previously involved in a sex scandal with the adult film actress and stripper Stormy Daniels. President Trump also blithely tossed paper towel rolls into a crowd after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

The Heinz Label Project, a similar “culture-jamming” campaign completed during the 2004 Presidential Election, drew attention to the issue of money in mainstream politics. By highlighting the connection between Democratic nominee Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and his wife Teresa Heinz’ ketchup fortune, this tongue-in-cheek guerrilla art project playfully reminded the public of the massive fortunes necessary for mainstream political campaigns.