Hyperallergic Features Mary Mattingly

Mary Mattingly Confronts Climate Change With Utopic Resourcefulness

By Hyperallergic

In Mary Mattingly’s ruminative exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, Pipelines and Permafrost, photographic landscapes hang from the walls like scrolls. Their elongated portrait orientations (ranging in size from 44 by 14 to 82 by 24 inches) were inspired by the narrow cylindrical lengths and sedimentary layers of core samples. Each image depicts a fictional composite of an actual site, in which three or more landscape photographs have been stacked atop one another and spliced together to form a stratified column of earth and sky. The columns are intended to evoke — imaginatively rather than literally — the site’s geological timeline. In most cases, one of the stacked photographs is upside down, underscoring the work’s artifice.

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Mary Mattingly Featured in The Brooklyn Rail

Mary Mattingly: Pipelines and Permafrost

By The Brooklyn Rail

Mary Mattingly’s recent photographs in Pipelines and Permafrost stitch together a story of geologic deep time for the imagination. The New York-based artist has always woven ecological concerns into her public works and photography practice, committed to helping audiences question how the land and water resources as well as the products and presumptions of our lives came to be. As geologist Marcia Bjornerud writes in her 2018 book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, “we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws.” Mattingly is deft, however—never preaching or moralizing. She leaves it for us to see what we can and do what we wish with these insights. In this exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, her photographs help us glimpse the deep time of the Earth we inhabit.

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Fotografiska New York with Robert Mann on Julie Blackmon

In Conversation - Gallerist Robert Mann on the Photography of Julie Blackmon

By Fotografiska New York

A live in the room conversation with Robert Mann and Grace Noh, Exhibitions Manager at Fotografiska New York.

Listen to the full conversation here.

Mike Mandel in the New Yorker

MIKE MANDEL’S SELFIES FROM THE SEVENTIES

By The New Yorker

In 1971, Mike Mandel released a book of photographs called “Myself: Timed Exposures.” Part of their loose, easy charm has to do with Mandel’s appearance: with his long dark hair and thick-framed glasses, he looks like a cartoon version of a peaceable hippie, rambling through black-and-white Southern California. Though the title prepares you for an onslaught of Mandel, only two of the images show him alone in the frame. The other thirty-seven photographs feature strangers of all types, as Mandel thrusts himself into the bustle and rush of street life, popping up among people like an imp, a groovy visitor from another planet. There he is, shirtless in corduroy cutoffs, smiling with a housewife at a supermarket meat counter, or lying flat on the floor of a library with his arms tight at his sides, students craning to observe this sudden interruption. In another photo, Mandel squeezes onto a crowded bench at an airport, his face blurry, the people on either side of him blurry too, caught mid-laugh. Some of the photos require you to search Mandel out, scan for his identifying uniform of big black glasses and lank hair, as if he were an R. Crumb version of Waldo. Then you spot him: a sliver of Mandel, peering over the heads of a gaggle of young girls at Disneyland or just barely visible in the reflection of a beauty-parlor mirror.

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B&H PHOTOGRAPHY PODCAST with julie blackmon

”We present a fun and insightful conversation on this week’s episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, perhaps due to the Midwestern charm of photographer Julie Blackmon and the enjoyable discussion of her wonderful tableaux vivants of family life in middle America. We also welcome back to the show gallery owner Robert Mann, who is currently hosting an exhibit of Blackmon’s photographs titled Talent Show. Mann was a guest on our show, in 2018, when we spoke about the work of Australian photographer Murray Fredericks.” - B&H Photography Podcast

Listen here.

Julie Blackmon in i-D Magazine

JULIE BLACKMON'S SURREAL PHOTOS CAPTURE DAILY LIFE IN AMERICAN SUBURBS

It was in Julie Blackmon’s 30s, after she’d moved into a 100-year-old house in Springfield, Missouri, “in the middle of the country, in a city with a generic name,” that she decided to pursue photography in a real way. She discovered her new suburban home had a darkroom in the basement, which had once spawned Springfield’s first photography business. And as she tried to make the living room look like Pottery Barn — “It was all the rage to have black and white pictures of your kids lined up on a shelf behind your couch at that time,” she says — the mother of three became inspired by the humour she found in the everyday moments of domestic life.

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Julie Blackmon in the New York Times

7 THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND

By The New York Times

Julie Blackmon’s work might immediately resonate as the images portray family life, chaotic and messy as we now more intimately know it to be. The other shows hew toward staged pieces. Cooper & Gorfer’s studio shots put a unique spin on displacement, situating female migrants, pictured like goddesses, into vaunted scenes of utopian privilege. Moving away from photographing celebrities, Martin Schoeller turns to intimate video portraits that spotlight people we often ignore: ex-inmates, or, more precisely, those once wrongly sentenced to death. Naima Green upends the traditional notion of portraiture and who it’s meant to serve with images of the L.G.B.T.Q. community — a strategy Andy Warhol daringly employed years ago in two series that the institution has placed on its website.

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Julie Blackmon on B&H Photography Podcast

PODCAST: ALL IN THE FAMILY, WITH JULIE BLACKMON, AND A NEW NORMAL FOR PHOTO GALLERIES

By B&H Photography Podcast

We present a fun and insightful conversation on this week’s episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, perhaps due to the Midwestern charm of photographer Julie Blackmon and the enjoyable discussion of her wonderful tableaux vivants of family life in middle America. We also welcome back to the show gallery owner Robert Mann, who is currently hosting an exhibit of Blackmon’s photographs titled Talent Show. Mann was a guest on our show, in 2018, when we spoke about the work of Australian photographer Murray Fredericks.

Click here for the full podcast.

Maroesjka Lavigne Photographs for The New Yorker

How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands

By The New Yorker

It is a place to retreat to in a time of plague. Outside the town are miles and miles of empty land, and few roads. Nothing anywhere but whitegrass, dark, scrubby bushes growing close to the ground, and rocks. Only low mountains and no trees, so there’s little to block the incessant wind that blows in from the sea. It’s very quiet, at least when the wind dies down, and some people find the silence and the emptiness hard to take. Before the war, in 1982, some of the bigger farms employed dozens of men, and there were settlements with forty or fifty people living in them, but most of those people are gone now, either moved or emigrated. These days, there is one person for every twelve square miles. Some of the old houses are vacant and derelict; others were hauled out of the settlements, leaving not so much as a gravel track behind, because the people who lived there rode horses.

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The Wall Street Journal on Artists during Covid

How Artists Stayed Creative During the Lockdown

By The Wall Street Journal

Brooklyn-based artist Mary Mattingly is best known for large-scale public projects that tackle big issues, like “Swale” (2016), an industrial barge that she turned into a “floating food forest” filled with edible plants for harvesting by visitors, which addresses food insecurity and sustainability. But in the first weeks of lockdown, health issues pushed her art in another direction. 

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