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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Michiko Kon: Mistress of the dark

Michiko Kon: Mistress of the dark

BY JOHN L. TRAN

The abominable beauty of Michiko Kon’s work is back.

In the early 1990s Kon was one of the first female photographic artists from Japan to achieve widespread international recognition. Her work combined a shocking use of animal parts with meticulous technique in a way that was both unsettling and visually seductive. She reached prominence around the time that Damien Hirst first exhibited his shark in a tank of formaldehyde, but some years after Joel-Peter Witkin had started using animal and human body parts in staged photographic tableaux in the ’80s.

Kon’s “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” vibe, however, makes the British superstar’s butterfly works look like the self-comforting behavior of Frankenstein’s monster sticking stuff to a wall, while compared to Witkin’s darker and more stridently transgressive work, there is a Rococo-like decorativeness and wit to what she does.

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Vanity featured in Must-See Art Guide: New York on Artnet

Must-See Art Guide: New York
BY Tatiana Berg

Are you ready for Armory week? Ready or not, here it is: You’ve got NADA, you’ve got VOLTA, you’ve got SCOPE, and last but certainly not least, you’ve got the Armory Show. That’s a lot! If you want help navigating it all, we’ve got you covered with our comprehensive go-to guide of the fairs.

But art was not meant to live in art fairs alone. So pull on your snow and/or rain boots, and get traipsing out to New York’s local galleries to find out what else is going on out there.

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Aesthetica Interviews Maroesjka Lavigne

Sublime Topographies

The second edition of PHOTOFAIRS San Francisco brings together a diverse range of practitioners that investigate landscapes and subject matter from a multitude of perspectives. Maroesjka Lavigne (b. 1989) records remote corners of the earth. Land of Nothingness – a series which possesses a similar uncanny quality – captures the sublime topography of Namibia, one of the least populated regions in the world.

A: Your work covers themes of beauty, identity and varying landscapes, often drawing on a minimalistic, muted colour scheme. What can we expect to see from you during the San Francisco Photo Fair? 
ML: There will be a piece of my new work at the fair. In a way, it’s an extension of my previous work. I’m still looking for a specific type of landscape, but this series specifically focuses on the colour, shape and the overall tactility and texture of the land.

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Musee Magazine Reviews Murray Fredericks: Vanity

Exhibition Review: Vanity By Murray Fredericks

By Ilana Jael

In Act 3, Scene 2, of Hamlet, William Shakespeare suggests that great art must hold “a mirror up to nature”.  And over 400 years later, photographer Murray Fredericks has more or less taken this suggestion literally to sublime result in his photo series Vanity, on view from now until April 7th at the Robert Mann Gallery in Chelsea. The “nature” in question being reflected upon  is Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the largest lake and lowest natural point in Frederick’s native Australia. This exhibition is the first chance the photographer has been granted to share his substantial gifts with the United States, and his appearance across the pond with such awe-striking images in tow is certainly a welcome one.

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Holly Andres installation at Museum of Northwest Art

The Homecoming
When photographs tell stories

By Stephen Hunter

A sophisticated artist and professor in Portland, Oregon, Holly Andres remains refreshingly modest about her sudden success. She receives commissions for photo shoots from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Time, and the New Yorker, and her fine art gets attention in Art in America, Art Forum, Glamour, and beyond.

In her current Museum of Northwest Art installation in La Conner, “The Homecoming,” Andres’ still photographs tell three stories: “Summer of the Hornets,” “River Road,” and “The Fall of Spring Hill.”

Andres stages her dramas in woodlands, meadows, dirt roads and carefully prepared interiors. The scenes with professional actors are interspersed with richly colored and textured still lifes, which subtly advance the action. The bright colors and simplicity of her compositions lure the viewer into what soon proves to be a darker, even menacing, subject matter. 

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