The term "High Line Effect" typically refers to the international phenomenon in which global cities, having seen the park's transformation of a previously derelict stretch of train tracks into a thriving public space, seek to recreate its powers of resurrection by building one of their own. The High Line's other effect, when viewed more closely, is its magnetic draw to tourists and developers. Jennifer Williams "The High Line Effect," an installation of photo collages opening at Robert Mann Gallery Thursday, focuses on the latter.
Williams's non-linear (pun intended) approach to collage is uncannily appropriate for the subject matter. Photographs of cranes, construction sites, architecture, and the Standard Hotel are going to radiate from images of the lush tourist-trodden path and spill out of the constraints of the walls and onto the gallery's floors and ceilings. The immersive presentation has the potential to convey what the park's fans may fail to grasp in real life: The High Line is a living thing, a catalyst for what the gallery refers to as "multifaceted and mutating urban change." And it just keeps growing.
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Artslant reviews Mary Mattingly: House and Universe
For her show of new photography and sculpture at Robert Mann gallery in Chelsea, Mary Mattingly first created a number of "man made boulders," which were made by amassing her possessions and binding them together with light brown twine. Measuring about five feet in diameter, these boulders consist of clothes, journals, keys, bottles, wires, and other miscellaneous items that Mattingly found kicking around her home. Two of these boulders are on display at the exhibition, as well as fifteen digital photographs in which she explores the push and pull between the destructive excesses of consumer culture and the utopian potential of DIY asceticism. Weaving together themes of sustainability and balance, buoyancy and weight, Mattingly's work provokes a reassessment of our relationship with inanimate objects in a rapidly changing world where survival and destruction, waste and renewal, are the twin poles of orientation.
For instance, in Pull (2013), the artist drags a comically massive boulder down a city sidewalk. It looks like strenuous work, instantly evoking an experience familiar to anyone who has ever schlepped their every belonging from one apartment building to another. The same boulder (or one which looks just like it) also appears in The Life of Objects (2013), where it balances precariously on top of a male nude figure who lies dwarfed beneath it, curled up in the fetal position with his back to the camera. These works prompt us to reconsider the age-old truism that we don't own our possessions so much as they own us. Sometimes the cumulative weight of things threatens to drag us under, as in A Ruin In Reverse (2013), in which a coffin-shaped boulder lies in a freshly dug grave—inviting comparison to Christo's Red Package (1968)—or as in Floating A Boulder (2012), in which a row boat carries a dangerously tall tower of garbage bags while drifting towards an indistinct grey horizon. Floating A Boulder is one of the many photographs in the show with an aquatic theme; another is Microsphere (2012) in which a floating globe populated by three passengers is buoyed by a collection of plastic bottles. Flock (2012) depicts one of Mattingly's "flock houses"; these are self sufficient floating homes that resemble Andrea Zittel's "living units" crossed with Kevin Costner's Waterworld.
Mary Mattingly's forays into water-borne sustainable living serve as a light-hearted counterpoint to the oppressive weight of her man made boulders, although there is a levity to the boulders as well: it must have been cathartic for her to clean out her home and repurpose her clutter as art. Mattingly's work suggests that the accretion of consumer products and man-made waste clogging up the arteries of our planet and our lives can be put to new uses, and that there is hope for us yet.
Read the complete article by David E. Willis here.
House and Universe featured in Art In America’s ’The Lookout’
The digital photo-collages in Mary Mattingly's exhibition "House and Universe" are 2-D representations of the collaborative projects she's worked on for the past few years. Mattingly's Triple Island, a self-sustaining ecosystem installed on a Brooklyn pier through November, and the Flock Houses, portable and adaptable homes, both factor into these recent images, which depict wrapped bundles of material possessions (resting among similarly scaled boulders, or being dragged down a city street) and people inhabiting dome-shaped structures floating in industrial waterways. The frequency of floods, hurricanes, droughts and other natural disasters over the past decade make Mattingly's solutions seem not all that far-fetched.
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The New Yorker reviews Mary Mattingly: House and Universe
In a show of color photographs that touch on consumerism, waste, and the environment, people turn up only here and there, and they're always overwhelmed or absorbed by their bundled-up belongings. Mattingly is seen pulling a huge ball of her own lashed-together stuff (clothes, books, headphones, shampoo) down the sidewalk; two similarly dense accumulations of household goods, held together by twine, occupy the gallery floor. In photographs, other bundles have turned into ad-hoc shelters, gigantic backpacks, or boulder-like masses that look like Christo's rope-bound sculptures. In Mattingly's world, we're all refugees dragging our overstuffed lives around. Through Oct. 19.
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House and Universe selected by PDN for ‘Photo of the Day’
In her current exhibition House and Universe, American visual artist Mary Mattingly combines digital photography with experimental design to explore environmental issues. In an article about the opening in today's New York Times, author Martha Schwendener explains: "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."
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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’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.
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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 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.
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