Hyperallergic features Mary Mattingly’s exhibition, What Happens After

Taking Apart the War Machine to See What’s Inside

Ilana Novick

By centering the actual machinery of war, Mary Mattingly’s exhibition, What Happens After, pushes viewers who haven’t experienced war to consider what it must be like.

The military truck at the center of Mary Mattingly’s What Happens After, now on view at BRIC House, has been to Iraq, transporting weapons and soldiers in the first Gulf War, and then to Afghanistan. It didn’t kill anyone by itself, but as a military vehicle, was a conduit to carnage. It met an untimely end after the online auction Mattingly bought it from: Now it’s in pieces in the middle of an art gallery. Visiting the exhibition is an exercise in grappling with answering the title’s question — whether the new context neutralizes it, reclaims it, or hides the violence it was responsible for.

Mattingly makes viewers work for their own answers.

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Mary Mattingly: What Happens After at BRIC in Hyperallergic

BRIC Presents New Large-Scale Work by Mary Mattingly in What Happens After

An exhibition of large-scale sculpture, photography, and a monumental wall-based flow chart. On view in Downtown Brooklyn through November 11.

BRIC is pleased to present Mary Mattingly: What Happens After, an exhibition of large-scale sculpture, photography, and a monumental wall-based flow chart, that poses the question: what happens when an object that embodies both the systemic violence represented by war and by climate change is manifested in a public space? When we’re able to collaboratively change the form and function of an object with a violent and complex history, it can be powerful. Can it be healing?

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New work by cig harvey featured in the New york times

Turning Poetry Into Photos

Photographers read poems written by 6 women. Here’s what they saw in the words.

By Kerri MacDonald and Morrigan McCarthy
Aug. 17, 2018

Cig Harvey: “Edge” by Layli Long Soldier

Ms. Harvey, who is based in Maine, photographed her daughter for this series. Her photos are about “that sensation of ingesting the wind and time passing.”

The poem “Edge” reminds me of the everyday. An elevated everyday. As if Layli Long Soldier took all my daily car rides with my daughter Scout and distilled them into nine lines. In our cars we are our own planets. I ask questions. She says things. I search the rearview mirror for gestures and expressions.

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The New Yorker: Goings On About Town

Outdoor Artworks Tackle Environmental Issues, at Storm King

On the five hundred acres of the Storm King Art Center, in Cornwall, New York, the sight of weeping willows or maples is no surprise—but a tropical-palm grove? The palm trees were transplanted by Mary Mattingly, one of the seventeen participants in “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change” (through Nov. 11). Also featured are sculptures by Maya Lin offering a glimpse into the secret life of grass and Jenny Kendler’s installation “Bird Watching” (above), representing a hundred eyes of as many threatened or endangered species.

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Michael Kenna featured in the Guardian

Timber! Michael Kenna's magical trees – in pictures

From the lakes of Hokkaido to the forests of Abruzzo, the British photographer has scoured the world’s landscapes to capture their silent guardians.

Michael Kenna, one of the world’s leading landscape photographers, is known for his emphatically analogue approach to his work and his elegiac tone.

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Mary Mattingly featured in The Guardian

Artists on climate change: the exhibition tackling a global crisis

By Nadja Sayej

At the Storm King Art Center in New York, a group of artists has come together to showcase works that cover a growing, and often ignored, issue.

The week before the Storm King Art Center opened its public art exhibition on the 500-acre premises in Mountainville, New York, there was a tornado.

It was fitting considering the topic of the exhibition, Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, which features over a dozen artists who tap into climate change “and hopefully, take action to help curb its advances”, explains the curator, Nora Lawrence.....

Along the stunning landscape of Storm King – about 60 miles north of New York City – one thing stands out: the palm trees, of all things. They were planted there by artist Mary Mattingly for her artwork Along the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest. There is a set of three tropical fruit trees, including coconut palms and a ponytail palm, which were shipped from Florida. Since an expected temperature rise of 4C is expected across the globe in the years to come, could residents ever harvest a palm tree in upstate New York?

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Mary Mattingly featured in New York Times

WHAT TO SEE IN NEW YORK ART GALLERIES THIS WEEK

BY JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Mary Mattingly’s new collage photographs are disorienting. One, titled “Endgame” (2017), centers on a picture of two cranes standing in marshy waters. As the birds dip their beaks, the slope of their necks directs the viewer’s gaze downward, to a table in front of the picture, on which sit three objects: what looks like an oblong chunk of black rock, a pile of rocks tied together with string and shards of pottery similarly bound. Just below the tabletop, where there should be a wall, there is instead a rectangle of bare trees. It interrupts the illusionistic space and compounds a looming question: How do all the elements here conceptually connect?

For her exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, “Because for Now We Still Have Poetry,” Ms. Mattingly researched the supply chains of minerals involved in photography: cobalt, phosphate, germanium and more. She discovered a system of mining and extraction whose complexity and scale are barely graspable. Her still lifes reflect this: They’re puzzles whose pieces we recognize, but whose compositions are dictated by a logic we don’t understand.

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Mary Mattingly reviewed in Hyperallgeric

Mary Mattingly’s Poetry of Things

By Louis Bury

Mattingly makes the case that poetry is precisely what’s missing from mainstream responses to anthropogenic climate change.

The title of Mary Mattingly’s fourth solo exhibition at Robert Mann gallery, Because For Now We Still Have Poetry, has, like the artwork in the show, more than a touch of poetry. The title’s “for now” pointedly conveys the show’s twin strains of ecological optimism and pessimism, but its invocation of “poetry” is more mysterious. Among the world’s resources imperiled by climate change, poetry would seem to rank far down the list for most people. Yet Mattingly’s work makes the case that our capacity for poetry, writ large — what the ancient Greeks called poiesis, or imaginative creation — is precisely what’s missing from mainstream aesthetic, political, and cultural responses to anthropogenic climate change.

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Julie Blackmon at AIPAD featured in Hyperallergic

Artificial Childhoods, Fading Innocence, and Black Panthers at the Photography Show

By Alissa Guzman

Portraiture and history dominates this year’s The Photography Show, and there are many stand out works by Osamu Yokonami, Julie Blackmon, Ryan Vizzions, and others.

Viewers looking for images reflecting anything other than the annals of history, celebrity portraits, or cultural and political icons, however, must dig much deeper, as topical messages are few and far between. In this era of digital and mobile photography, where Instagram has upwards of 800 million users, The Photography Show is shockingly black & white. Expecting Ryan Trecartin-like experimentation that pushes the boundaries of photography, screens were noticeably absent. Despite these limitations, a few themes emerged that felt both topical and noteworthy, beginning with a surprising fixation on children, adolescence, and innocence....

The images of Julie Blackmon at Robert Mann Gallery deal with similar issues but through a very different lens, as Blockmon uses cinematic-inspired sets to capture her own family enacting moments from a suburban childhood. Highly composed, overly artificial and yet somehow completely believable, Blackmon’s images bring the feeling of dystopian angst into her perfectly crafted scenes.

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Cig Harvey Featured in Vice's Woman Seeing Woman

These Haunting Photos Were Inspired by a Near-Death Experience

By Elyssa Goodman

When a car crash left her unable to speak, Cig Harvey used photography to examine life's miracles and misfortunes.

Women are overlooked far too often in photography. How can we continue to combat this erasure? My answer is this column, “Woman Seeing Woman.” While it’s just the start of solving this problem, I, a female writer and photographer, hope to celebrate the astoundingly powerful female voices we have in photography by offering a glimpse into their work.

It's been well documented that a brush with death can reframe a person's relationship with life. When a car crash left photographer Cig Harvey unable to speak for several weeks, she turned to her art to make sense of life and the human experience. Harvey's most recent book, You an Orchestra You a Bomb, recalls in sprightly color and inky darkness the shortness of our time on earth. Through photographs and text, the book both celebrates and mourns the fleeting nature of existence. "Underneath thin skin, amongst saliva, organs, and bone, we are orchestras,” Harvey writes. "But open our mouths, deep down between tears, nerves, and gristle, we are bombs."

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