Made In L.A. is coming to the Hammer, Barnsdall Park, LAXART, and billboards around town on June 2 and will showcase sixty emerging, under-recognized Los Angeles artists–one of which will be voted to win a $100,000 prize. In order to help you make an educated vote this summer, we’re counting down to Made In L.A. by showcasing each artist participating in the biennial.

Dashiell Manley is a multidisciplinary artist who mainly works in painting, performance, and video.

His works tie language and abstraction together, creating these almost fogged up landscapes of clouds and words. In his paintings–which are more accurately “framed objects” as he has become known for creating double-sided art pieces, one side canvas while the other is glass–this comes through from scrawls and scribblings of obscured words, complimented by pools and spills and stains of color, usually dark and ominous colors. This is often juxtaposed with the other side of the piece, which tend to mirror the previous side or stray completely into being these non-objective abstractions.

His videos employ similar visual techniques, paint and words drifting through each other, dissolving the value of the text and letters. The videos really push what his framed objects seek to express, which is the deconstruction of language and words. His process is also incredibly taxing and insane as most of the videos are stop-motion pieces composed of thousands of photographs he’s taken. In a show he participated last year at Favorite Goods, he made a video of “10,785 still photographs and 4 minutes of live action.” It’s quite impressive what he accomplishes and it’s even more impressive how these films animate his other works.

We’re stoked to see what Manley brings to the show. We’re betting it will be one of his video pieces as those, really, are the most impressive and are his calling card. He–along with what now seems like tons of the other artists–are really proving that video art is the new *it* space to be working in.