There's something intangibly eerie about empty museums; when the spaces are under construction (torn-up floors, sculptures draped with cloths, errant ladders) it's even more unsettling. For the last 10 years, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has been under construction (it reopened last spring). During that time period, Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo visited the space several times a year, documenting the demolition and renovation of the museum's interior spaces in rich chromogenic prints. Especially stirring are her shots of diffusely lit empty walls, hallways and doorways that look like color field paintings.
Read the feature online here.
Mary Mattingly in the February issue of Art in America
Art for the Anthropocene Era
By Eleanor Heartney
News from the ecological front has been alarming of late. There was September's report from UN scientists on the acceleration of climate change and the near certainty that these developments are man-made. Then there was the impending arrival of Fukushima radiation on the West Coast, accompanied by half-hearted assurances that "most" of the radiation would be diluted to levels safe for human contact. These reports arrived as New York City prepared to commemorate the first anniversary of the devastating landfall of Superstorm Sandy, reviving memories of other recent damaging "natural" disasters, among them hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Irene...
...Mary Mattingly looks beyond the kind of immediate problems addressed by [Lillian Ball and Mel Chin] toward what she refers to as the posthuman future, reflecting her conviction that humanity will survive only if we reduce our footprint on Earth. Over the last 13 years she has been engaged in a number of projects that explore the possibility of self-sustaining environments. Her "Wearable Homes" are garments designed to keep the wearer comfortable no matter what the temperature. The 2009 "Waterpod Project," a collaboration with numerous people, was an amphibious home built atop a 30-by-100-foot barge—complete with living quarters, a greenhouse, a windmill and a chicken coop-on which she, three crew members and various guests lived for five months.
Read the complete article online here.
Wijnanda Deroo selected by PDN for “Photo of the Day”
Photo District News
Night (and Day) at the Museum
Ever dreamed of prowling through an art museum when no one else is there? Photographer Wijnanda Deroo was able to explore the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam repeatedly during the years it was closed for extensive renovations, from 2004 until it reopened in April 2013. Built in 1856, the museum, home to "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt and "The Milkmaid" by Vermeer, had undergone many additions in the past. The goal of the renovation was modernize its facilities and restore its floor plan to its architect's original design. Deroo returned several times each year, photographing the progress from demolition to reconstruction. Her images from the project, showing emptied galleries and priceless works of art surrounded by dropcloths, are now on view at Robert Mann Gallery in New York City through March 29. An opening reception will take place February 20.
Throughout her career, Deroo has traveled around the world, photographing interiors. As the gallery says in a statement, "Her images, devoid of people yet full of the vestiges of their presence, are at once intimate and haunting."
Read the article online here.
Announcing representation of Maroesjka Lavigne
Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Maroesjka Lavigne.
Lavigne, whose work marries a graphic aesthetic with a drive for honesty in representing people and place, is a young Belgian photographer who lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. After graduating with a Masters in Photography from Ghent University in 2012, the artist spent four months driving alone across Iceland to create her Ísland series, which was selected by FOAM Magazine as a finalist in the prestigious FOAM Talent Call. The series also won a LensCulture New & Emerging Photographers Grand Prize, and was shown at the 2012 Photo Academy Awards and the Unseen Photo Fair in the Netherlands, as well as the 44 Gallery in Bruges, Belgium.
Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland will open on April 3, 2014.
Mary Mattingly Film in Art21's New York Close Up
What's the latest trend in New York City real estate? Over the course of the summer and fall of 2013, artist Mary Mattingly constructs and occupies Triple Island (2013), an outdoor sculpture overlooking the East River. Situated in the newly developed Pier 42 public park—a waterfront area flooded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012—the sculpture rests on buoyant 55 gallon drums, which allow it to float in the event of rising sea levels. Mattingly and friends build Triple Island out of a mix of recycled, donated, and custom-made materials.
Read MoreJulie Blackmon in Photoalliance lecture at San Francisco Art Institute
Julie Blackmon
Friday, January 24th, 7:30pm
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco
About Domestic Vacations: The Dutch proverb "a Jan Steen household" originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen's personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
For more details and to continue reading, click here.
Jennifer Williams: The High Line Effect reviewed in ArtNews
Inspired by the richness and variety of the High Line, and its overall effect on the Chelsea neighborhood and the city itself, Jennifer Williams created a series of collages composed of digital photographs of the area that she manually pieced together. Eschewing traditional frames, she decided to install these works, which vary widely in shape and size, in such a way that they seemed to grow out of the gallery's ceiling, floor, and walls.
In fact, the collages often appeared to tumble to life, like so many angular, sculpted creatures. One of them, called 7000 Oaks to Tenth Avenue Square, was so large that it looked like a dinosaur about to take a stroll, while another, Approaching Hudson Yards (both 2013), hung from the ceiling like a plane caught mid-takeoff. Running through all of the works was the path of the elevated park, like the spines of the various creatures that Williams invented. The buildings almost overwhelm the green foliage in the images, much the same way they do in real life.
But as these works make apparent, amenities like the High Line are inevitably accompanied by increased development and higher rents. Williams's exuberant and attractive collages comment cogently on the ambiguous impact of the High Line.
The gallery also included a set of the artist's unrelated collages. Boxes #2 (2012) is particularly sensual, with layers of brown paper, varying in tone, folded and bent and squeezed together. These works beg viewers to touch them and glide their fingers across the surfaces, giving them an opportunity to sense Williams's emotional states.
—Valerie Gladstone
Fred Stein at The Jewish Museum — In the Press
To see the full original webcast please click here.
Haaretz Israeli News
The wedding present that Lilo and Fred Stein bought themselves was never left unused: The newly married Jewish couple brought the 35mm Leica camera with them when they left Germany in the fall of 1933. They ostensibly were going on their honeymoon, but in fact were fleeing the Nazis only a few months after Hitler came to power. Read the full article here.
Spiegel Online
A photo session? No thanks! In 1946, Albert Einstein turned down a request by photographer Fred Stein to shoot pictures of him at Princeton. But it wasn't long before Einstein relented, agreeing to a meeting that he insisted should last no longer than 10 minutes. It turned into a two-hour encounter during which they swapped jokes, and which produced an image that has been branded into the collective consciousness, that of the physicist in his mid-sixties with his trademark tussled hair and sad, lonely gaze. Read the full article here.
Mary Mattingly: House and Universe reviewed in Art In America
"We're probably doomed as humans if we don't start thinking in a posthuman way," Mary Mattingly posited during a recent "Art:21" documentary. Her grim assessment, a by-product of years spent independently studying the exploitation of workers and natural resources that propels consumption in the world's affluent areas, is accompanied by ambitious experiments in imagining more sustainable means of subsistence. In the highly inventive tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Mattingly has fabricated futuristic "Wearable Homes"—protective suits equipped to guard against extreme temperatures, flooding, insects and bacteria—and mobile geodesic domes. Several such domes were mounted on the "Waterpod," a retrofitted barge that carried the artist and her crew around New York City's harbor for six months in 2009 as they tried to live self sufficiently on the vessel (growing food, recycling rainwater, etc.).
"House and Universe," Mattingly's third solo show with Robert Mann, reflected the artist's environmental concerns in two sculptures and 15 photographs, many of which document her public projects. The photo Flock (2012), for example, features one of her floating structures. Atop a platform, two geodesic domes covered with white tarps and surrounded by containers of plants are engulfed by an expanse of sky and sea. Continent (2012) shows a barge and rafts subsumed in a murky fog; a sharp edge between the rippling waters and the solid background, among other Photoshopped aspects of the image, reveals the barren surroundings as an aesthetic frame. The unmoored vessel thus emerges as both a symbol of vulnerability and a privileged vantage point in these and several other of the show's photographs, which evince a romantic tendency eclipsed by sheer purpose and will in the artist's mobile environments. Yet, if Mattingly's intentions are resolutely political, her photographs nonetheless evoke the spiritual. Take the serene vision of escape in For a Week Without Speaking (2012), a photograph depicting the artist rowing in quietly rippling waters, her bundled possessions atop wooden shafts, in the autumnal glow of a forested bank.
Mattingly's combination of ecological engagement and otherworldly beauty is reminiscent of much Land art, and she knowingly interpolates herself into this tradition with Filling Double Negative (in collaboration with Greg Lindquist), 2013. Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969), a vast trench on Nevada's Mormon Mesa, is pictured from its depths with a boulder in the foreground wrapped in a blue-green tarp and twine. Heizer's piece functions as an important reference for the show, in its paradoxical use of emptying to achieve scale.
Mattingly advances reduction as a Sisyphean task. In the 52-by-36-by-36-inch sculpture Terrene (2012), a hanging twine-wrapped ball of domestic sundries—purses, bedside lamps, paperback novels and art magazines—the artist has compressed her belongings into a burden. Rather than push this hodgepodge boulder up a hill, she pulls it across a city sidewalk in Pull (2013) and places it on top of a reclined nude male, seen from behind, for Life of Objects (2013). In the urban outdoors, the mass of intimate possessions seems to expose the shame of private accumulation; indoors, on a naked, anonymous man, it becomes a more visceral strain on individualism.
Accompanying these works, Mattingly created a website, own-it.us, that catalogues each of her possessions, tracing their constituent elements to mining and extraction operations around the world. In this way, she elegantly extends her work from the domestic to the global, proving her show's title a political injunction to understand how each house contributes to the making of our universe.
—Kareem Estefan
December 2013
Read the article online here.
David Vestal 1924-2013
David Vestal passed away this week at home in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Born in Menlo Park, California in 1924, Vestal studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago before becoming involved in photography in the late 1940s through the Photo League in New York. Rather than working in photographic essays like many of his New York School contemporaries, Vestal captured singular moments of life in the city through his emotive and atmospheric images—a lone figure passing along a snowy sidewalk, a twilight drive over the George Washington Bridge, or the bustling traffic in Flatiron Square at night.
Vestal received two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships in photography in 1966 and 1973. He wrote extensively for various photography publications, and published two classic books on photographic craft and printing: The Craft of Photography, 1975, and The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, 1984. A lifelong educator, his illustrious teaching career included positions at Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute, as well as numerous lectures and workshops around the country. His work is included in such notable public collections as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Portrait of David Vestal taken by Len Kowitz, 2004.