The New York Times reviews Mary Mattingly: House and Universe

After exhibiting eco-science-fiction photographs early in her career, Mary Mattingly started experimenting with real-life situations, living on her "Waterpod" project, drifting around New York Harbor in 2009 and more recently in various self-sufficient "Flock Houses." Here, she returns to photography and works that are scruffier than her earlier ones, but more personal and poignant. They're often funny, too—although the underlying message, as with most things eco, is apocalyptic.

For the exhibition, Ms. Mattingly bound up virtually all her possessions, creating what she calls "man-made boulders," which resemble postminimalist sculptures. One photograph finds her pulling a boulder down a city street, while another, "Ruin in Reverse" (2013), is reminiscent of photographs of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American performance artist — except here a gravelike trench is filled with a bundle of castoff objects rather than a woman's body.

Art history allusions abound, since Ms. Mattingly's possessions include, unsurprisingly, lots of art books and ephemera. A copy of "Janson's History of Art" can be spotted in "Ruin in Reverse." Another photo fills Michael Heizer's earthwork "Double Negative" (1969-70) in Nevada with a bright blue-green "boulder," also reminiscent of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's wrapped objects.

Photography's recent history is also invoked. Where digital manipulation was embraced in the '80s and then eschewed in the aughts, Ms. Mattingly chooses a third path: her clumsy and obvious Photoshopping looks like an environmental disaster someone was either too arrogant or lazy (or incompetent) to clean up—which works perfectly in this context.

—Martha Schwendener

Mary Mattingly discusses House and Universe

Mary Mattingly spoke to Artsy Editorial and Art-Rated about climate change, her life's objects, and the language of photography on the occasion of her opening exhibition House and Universe, currently on view.

Artsy Editorial
Imagine a personal flying machine, equipped with jetpacks, that could collect dew from clouds to supply fresh drinking water to the traveler; or a futuristic, water-based floating city designed to mutate with the tides and serve, at once, as transportation, island, and residence—Mary Mattingly did. At the turn of the millenium, after three consecutive catastrophic floods prompted privatization of water resources, the Brooklyn-based sculptor and photographer took note and started drafting. As so began Mattingly's mission to create imaginative-yet-practical solutions for imminent world change—none, as of yet, which have proven too quixotic to be realized. Mattingly's latest venture, Triple Island, is a scalable, amphibious ecosystem parked at Lower Manhattan's Pier 42, providing regenerative shelter, power, food, and water to a future New York. On the occasion of her public project and a new exhibition of photographs at Robert Mann Gallery, we spoke with Mattingly on nomadic homes (her "Flock Houses"), the post-humanist future, and the issues she carries with her—just like her wearable home—wherever she goes.

Read the full interview here.

Art-Rated
Art-Rated: At a glance your work seems very rooted in the creation of objects and projects aimed at artistically raising awareness (and providing solutions) to issues like sustainable living, overconsumption, mass production and environmentally unaware design. In addition to all that, your practice includes more imaginative and expressive works, usually photomontages that transplant your sculptures into remixed versions of the future. Can you speak to those two areas of your work? Did they develop in tandem or did one lead to the other?

Mary Mattingly: For the past eight years I've been making forms of tools and housing. I make photographs simultaneously that document these tools. Like the photographs, these sculptures are made through collaging materials together. Some aren't functional but allude to different systems of living. Others describe and take part in networked, decentralized ecologies for communal life. I experiment living in and with them, and believe that people really have to experience and live them to understand how they can exist in reality, fictionally, and the places between. Through this process I document these things and their use. I ask, how can we provide for basic needs for every human and non-human? At times, the documents are as abstract as the tools, and propose dystopic futures with ways to work within. They propose and allow for new solutions to develop, but don't solve problems.

Read the full interview here.

Mary Mattingly’s Filling Double Negative in Brooklyn Rail

I made the journey to Double Negative with the artist Mary Mattingly in a 113-degree heat wave between the third and fourth of July. The fact that our trip coincided with Independence Day underscored a certain Americanness in the work's grand scale and location. We attempted (and failed) to camp at the base of its northern swath. Like my 2011 visit to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a frigid Utah winter, the unpredictable and circumscribing site-specific weather played a large role in the experience of the work. Approximately an hour and a half northeast of Las Vegas, Double Negative is situated in the crumbling capillary ridges that descend from the east side of Mormon Mesa, which was once the bottom of a prehistoric ocean. With a four-wheel drive Jeep, we made our approach through a segment of steep, winding dirt roads, crested the mesa and were guided with ease to the site by a map application on my smartphone.

Read the full article here.

Mary Mattingly in Interview Magazine

Mary Mattingly is one of the most self-aware people you'll ever meet. Her work, which consists largely of sculptures and installations created from mass-produced objects she's collected over the years, speaks not only to her creative ability as an artist, but also to her deep sensitivity to the world around her. "My goal is to create these structures of bundled objects so that I'm really faced with everything I rely on and consume," she says. "And it's a lot." Mattingly photographs her sculptures in natural habitats, uniting our world of "things" to that of their organic beginnings. In the spirit of a kind of homecoming, Mattingly hopes to get people thinking about what we're taking from the earth, and how we can use what we already have to our best advantage. Her work presents our possessions through a restrictive lens, showing just how much we'd have to carry if we bundled our objects to our own backs.

Read the full interview here.

The New Yorker reviews Hot Summer, Cool Jazz

Most of these classic black-and-white pictures by the great jazz photographer were taken in the forties and fifties, when Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, and Charlie Parker (all subjects here) were in their prime. Typically, Leonard catches the singers and musicians up close and mid-performance, sweating and swinging, often in a haze of cigarette smoke. When he pulls back, the scene opens up, and you feel as if you were right there, notably in a scene at the Downbeat Club in 1948, when Ella Fitzgerald's audience included a delighted Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.

To read this article online click here.

Robert Mann Gallery artists at The Smithsonian

A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
1st floor West, American Art Museum
Washington, DC
Through January 5, 2014

Featuring work by gallery artist Susan Rankaitis as well as the late Joe Deal, Aaron Siskind, and others, A Democracy of Images celebrates the ways in which the American experience has been molded and captured by photography. Rankaitis' combined media work Marvel (1986) reveals the outermost limits of the medium, while images by Deal, Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank take on American landscapes and American characters with a modernist eye.

Landscapes in Passing: Photographs by Steve Fitch, Robbert Flick, and Elaine Mayes
2nd Floor South, American Art Museum
Washington, DC
Through January 20, 2014

Eschewing idealistic vistas or romanced plains, the 48 works in Landscapes in Passing highlight the rapid expansion of civilization into the natural world. Flick's photographs, drawn from his series "Sequential Views" consist of grids of images made in Los Angeles in 1980 as he traversed the streets, stopping at prescribed temporal or geographical intervals. The installation is part of a series that highlights objects from the museum's collection that are rarely on public display.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Hot Summer, Cool Jazz

A soundtrack for the Herman Leonard exhibition at Mann would have to feature "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," not only because so many of the musicians pictured performed and recorded the song, but because smoke is an important element in many of the images. Fats Navarro and Frank Sinatra are both holding cigarettes as they perform. Smoke curls up in front of the saxophones of Gerry Mulligan and Sonny Stitt.

Smoke is also critical in "Lester 'Prez' Young, NYC" (1948); the saxophonist himself is not in the picture, but is instead represented by the pork pie hat with which he was synonymous. The hat hangs on the opened cover of his sax case; next to it is an empty Coke bottle with a lit cigarette balanced on its rim. The lighting on the hat emphasizes its regular oval shape, which contrasts with the irregular curling of the cigarette smoke. The picture is simultaneously simple and complex, not unlike Young's playing.

Herman Leonard (1923-2010) opened a studio in Greenwich Village in 1949, when it was a center of live jazz, and he made a specialty of photographing jazz musicians. All the players included in this show are of continuing interest: Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Ray Brown, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dinah Washington and more. A young Sarah Vaughan radiates melody as she sings at Birdland in 1949, and see Duke Ellington's enraptured smile as he listens to Ella Fitzgerald at the Downbeat Club in 1948.

To read the article online, click here.

Announcing representation of Jennifer Williams

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Jennifer Williams.

Williams' work refutes traditional classifications in its bold challenge to two-dimensionality through constructed illusion. Her photographic installations radically rupture the square frame and surface plane, bursting out in irrepressible radial fans on gallery walls or pouring down madly onto the floor.

Montaging images of such apparent mundanity as buildings, ladders, and garbage collected and photographed during walks through the city, Williams forges a sense of place. For the artist, the camera is not a vehicle of truth. Instead of attempting to capture an image as a static record, she makes work at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and collage to create nonlinear urban narratives of space and experience.

Williams received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from Goldsmiths College in London. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the country, and honors include the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and the NARS Foundation International Artist Residency, as well as the 2008 Juror's Grand Prize at the 4th Annual Alternative Processes show. She lives and works in New York City.

Jennifer Williams' first solo show at the gallery will open this October. For additional information about this work, please contact the gallery.

Mary Mattingly joins Art 21's New York Close Up

Gallery artist Mary Mattingly was one of seven New York-based artists recently added to the roster of the Art 21 documentary series New York Close Up. The program focuses on a culturally and creatively diverse group of artists in the first decade of their careers, following them through residencies and exhibitions and into their homes and studios to explore what it means to live and work in the New York City. The gallery will be exhibiting Mattingly's new work, which combines photography with environmental activism and large-scale sculptural projects, early this fall.

Read the article here.

The New York Times reviews Various Small Books

The New York Times reviews VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha, edited by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner.

The New York Times reviews VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS in the Sunday Book Review. The publication, an homage to the series-based work of Ed Ruscha, includes photography by gallery artists Jeff Brouws and Robbert Flick. It is also is co-edited by Brouws, who cites Ruscha as a long-time influence.

Read the article online here.