Mary Mattingly
Pipelines and Permafrost

In her fifth solo show at Robert Mann Gallery, Mary Mattingly exhibits a series of photographs that are driven by an urgency to document the speed of climate change and habitat fragmentation through images that appear as fluid timelines. These photographs interpret changes in land over geologic time (based on fossil records) in order to describe a place through its deep history. They also speculate on near futures as witness to an exponential speeding-up of geologic time due to human-induced climate change.

Pipelines and Permafrost was also driven by hope: hope that arises when people work together to combat destruction of a land base. It honors water, land, and forest protectors around the world who have fought for the rights of nature against increased industrialization. Many are Indigenous Peoples (or are in alliance) fighting to protect their nations and homelands against exploitation, many have struggled against extractive mining operations, logging corporations, and industrial agriculture* to protect primary forests, conserve animal habitats, plant species, and water. These photographs are particularly potent today because of the current administration’s relaxation of many environmental protections put in place by previous administrations, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.

“I needed photography to do something that was beyond documenting, and specifically documenting widespread traumas through visible scars left on land. So I started to construct these collages that fluidly evoke places from deep time through to a speculative future. To me, they honor the work of everyone involved in fighting for habitats, and for humanity by proxy.” —Mary Mattingly

Mattingly is a photographer and sculptor with a focus on Environmental Art. Most recently, Mattingly was announced as the Brooklyn Public Library’s Artist in Residence for 2020. Some of her major projects include the founding Swale, a landscape on a barge in New York City;  participating in the Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video Ecotopia show; the Waterpod Project in the New York City Mayor's Office; and Wearable Homes at the Anchorage Museum, examining the intersection of clothing and sustainability. She participated in MoMA PS1's "Expo 1" in collaboration with Triple Canopy Magazine in 2013, received a Knight Foundation Grant for her WetLand project that opened in 2014 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, and in 2015, she completed a two-part sculpture “Pull” for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her first Art 21: New York Close Up documentary video was released in 2013. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series.

*50% of proceeds from this exhibit will be donated to the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance.

For additional information and press materials, contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com).

‘We’re Burdened by So Many Things’: Watch Artist Mary Mattingly Literally Drag Everything She Owns Around New York

As part of a collaboration with Art21, hear news-making artists describe their inspirations in their own words.

by artnet

The holiday season is typically a time for loved ones to get together. But thanks to capitalism, even more than that, it’s a time to consume. Spend money, give gifts, receive gifts, repeat.

This holiday season, though, while things are at least a little bit different for nearly everyone, it’s worth turning to photographer Mary Mattingly, who makes a pretty good case against the consumer frenzy.

In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the New York Close Up series from 2013, Mattingly takes viewers on an uphill climb (literally) as she carries out the Sisyphean task of dragging her belongings throughout New York.

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MARY MATTINGLY - PIPELINES AND PERMAFROST

By Musée Magazine

In her most recent exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, entitled Pipelines and Permafrost, Mary Mattingly’s landscapes served as poignant reminders of the harsh effects of climate change. In staging the show, Mattingly took inspiration from core samples of earth for the grand dimensions and orientation of her images, each hung on the wall like a massive scroll, the tallest of them standing at over six feet.. With a closer look, it is evident that each column consists of various landscapes merged into a single picture’ elongated and exaggerated to resemble earth’s strata and provide a visual representation of how nature has changed at the hands of humans.

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Mary Mattingly Confronts Climate Change With Utopic Resourcefulness

Mattingly's landscape photographs evoke each site's geologic timeline.

BY Hyperallergic

“In Mary Mattingly’s ruminative exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, Pipelines and Permafrost, photographic landscapes hang from the walls like scrolls. Their elongated portrait orientations (ranging in size from 44 by 14 to 82 by 24 inches) were inspired by the narrow cylindrical lengths and sedimentary layers of core samples. Each image depicts a fictional composite of an actual site, in which three or more landscape photographs have been stacked atop one another and spliced together to form a stratified column of earth and sky. The columns are intended to evoke — imaginatively rather than literally — the site’s geological timeline. In most cases, one of the stacked photographs is upside down, underscoring the work’s artifice.”

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Mary Mattingly: Pipelines and Permafrost

BY The Brooklyn Rail

“Mary Mattingly’s recent photographs in Pipelines and Permafrost stitch together a story of geologic deep time for the imagination. The New York-based artist has always woven ecological concerns into her public works and photography practice, committed to helping audiences question how the land and water resources as well as the products and presumptions of our lives came to be. As geologist Marcia Bjornerud writes in her 2018 book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, “we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws.” Mattingly is deft, however—never preaching or moralizing. She leaves it for us to see what we can and do what we wish with these insights. In this exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, her photographs help us glimpse the deep time of the Earth we inhabit.”

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