night Gardens: An Afterword
Online exhibition
PRESS RELEASE | images
Through subtle reflections, doubled moons, and an abundant flora, Night Gardens: An Afterword expands on Mary Mattingly’s sumptuous works, with an important subtext regarding our environment. Melancholy becomes a landscape, or an alchemy of salt, light, and longing, brimming with texture, color, and life.
Due to a resounding response to the debut of the series in 2024, Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to release an online exhibition showcasing eleven additional works from the series Night Gardens and six unique cyanotype assemblages.
Mattingly, long recognized for her environmentally focused artwork and installations, extends her poetic warnings with even greater urgency. These new gardens seem to hover on the brink—lush Edens slowly sinking beneath the tide, where nature’s splendor and its undoing coexist in uneasy harmony and compelling beauty.
Mattingly shares, “These photographs draw from the ancient theory of the four humors which were each once thought to govern the body’s balance, mood, and temperament. Plants appear as companions in these states, standing in for cure, portent, and symptom alike.”
Through the combination of cuttings, scanned plants, painted and drawn flowers, flowers made of fabric, and digital manipulation, Mattingly further shapes the subjects of her images. New to the series are collages combining cyanotypes, archival pigment prints and elements of gold leaf, conjuring otherworldly moments, gleaming with possibility.
These magical environments transcend nature’s fragility and resilience, transforming ecological concern into luminous, layered visions. Night Gardens: An Afterword is a meditation on impermanence as rising seas threaten to turn riparian zones into inhabitable swamps. In their glow, one finds both a warning and wonder.
View the exhibition online starting November 6, 2025 through December 23, 2025. For additional information and press materials, please contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com).