Emily Manning
The Song of My Room

November 18 – December 19, 2025
48 Ludlow Street, NYC
Lower Level

Entrance presents The Song of My Room, an exhibition of work created by Emily Manning in her bedroom between 2021 and 2024. At the center of the exhibition are 33 ballpoint pen drawings on paper, a series Manning calls Blue Notes. These drawings, executed on pages from a single notebook purchased at the X-Tra dollar store on Halsey and Broadway in 2013, document what Manning describes as “the Blues”: images arriving through daily life and memory, including movie stills, cardboard boxes glimpsed on Chinatown sidewalks, her middle school mascot, roadside signage, songs moving one to tears. “I’d take photos of the Blues whenever I could (a paper towel dispenser in a public restroom). And sometimes, when I couldn’t (blindly running into the street, chasing a fish delivery truck),” Manning notes. The drawings continued until “the Blues stopped coming.”

Manning holds on to objects, and is keenly attuned to their use and wear over time. Long before its pages were used for these drawings, this notebook had countless glasses of water placed atop it. On the sill of an open bedroom window, it fluttered in gentle breezes and flapped in thunderstorms. The eight-year span between acquiring the notebook and beginning the series suggests something about readiness and attention, about the way certain projects wait for their moment, and certain materials demand to be used only when the artist is prepared to see what they might contain. In the same way, the drawings themselves are an act of holding on. Chance encounters become signs and the ordinary transforms into an enduring system of personal iconography. Her practice raises questions about how we assign significance to what we encounter.

The Song of My Room also features a cyanotype collage printed on linen, three Sharpie drawings on silk, and a plastisol screenprint on silk, most of which were produced in Manning’s Bed-Stuy apartment. During this time, Manning converted a closet-sized bathroom into a makeshift printmaking studio, using a UV grow light rigged to a towel rack for cyanotypes (a process requiring 36 hours to achieve the desired deep blue). The practice later expanded to silkscreening before being discontinued upon learning about the effects of emulsion on plumbing. Manning’s paint-splattered sage green plywood headboard (originally a work table from her brother Conor’s friend’s studio) is installed on the gallery’s north wall. During the years these works were made, it functioned as both headboard and display surface, where Manning would tape completed drawings to “live together for a little while, until I made something new.”

The exhibition also includes two new large-scale drawings of Medieval armor, culled from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection and drawn on silk. Although not produced during the same timeframe or in the same place, these works are an extension of the same impulse: hours spent making small marks on a delicate surface. 

The Blue Notes series has been compiled into a self-titled zine, published in an edition of 50.

Emily Manning (b. 1991, Hyannis, Massachusetts) primarily works across drawing, printmaking, collage and assemblage. While formally indebted to various punk traditions, her work is emotionally shaped by the lonely and sentimental environment of her native Cape Cod. Manning’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Entrance, New York and at Procell, New York (25 T-Shirts, 2023). She has participated in group exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, and London, including American Tourist (2024); SPEW at Dig-A-Hole Zines, Tokyo (2023); and JW Anderson: Your Picture/Our Future (2018). Her work has been featured in DRAIN 02 (Drain Publishing, 2024), and she has collaborated on special projects with brands such as Glue Skateboards, Vaquera, and Supreme.

A Note from the Artist

About the cassettes on the floor – I made these tapes to be played in the gallery. If you’d like, feel free to flip the tape or change it out with a different one when it’s finished. If you’d prefer silence, just hit “Stop”. The tapes feature: Andrew Weatherall, Arthur Russell, Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins, Cookie Mueller, The Cure, Current 93, Derek Jarman, Dire Straits, Eileen Myles, John Giorno, John Waters, Jonathan Richman, Judy Garland, Lana Del Rey, This Mortal Coil, Nan Goldin, Neil Young, New Order, ‘Out of the Blue’, Prefab Sprout, Primal Scream, Prince, Rene Ricard, Róisín Berkeley, Sinéad O’Connor, The Smiths, Spacemen 3, The Velvet Underground and more.

For inquiries, email info@entrance.nyc