Artnet Editors’ Picks: Love in the Time of Covid

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Editors’ Picks: 11 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Hunter College MFA Show to Greg Goldberg at the National Arts Club

By Artnet

Valentine’s Day may have come and gone, but this virtual amore-focused photography exhibition is still a fun dive into colorfully depicted scenes that explore themes of kinship, romance, and love. The works presented range from Cig Harvey’s vivid, hyper-saturated image of flowers, to Jeff Brouws’ monochromatic pink California house-scape and Margaret Watkins’s still life of a chocolate-toned lover’s gift.

Read the full event calendar here.

Pipelines and Permafrost in Artnet

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‘We’re Burdened by So Many Things’: Watch Artist Mary Mattingly Literally Drag Everything She Owns Around New York

By Artnet

The holiday season is typically a time for loved ones to get together. But thanks to capitalism, even more than that, it’s a time to consume. Spend money, give gifts, recieve gifts, repeat.

This holiday season, though, while things are at least a little bit different for nearly everyone, it’s worth turning to photographer Mary Mattingly, who makes a pretty good case against the consumer frenzy.

In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the New York Close Up series from 2013, Mattingly takes viewers on an uphill climb (literally) as she carries out the Sisyphean task of dragging her belongings throughout New York.

Read the full article here.

Musée Magazine Features Mary Mattingly

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MARY MATTINGLY - PIPELINES AND PERMAFROST

By Musée Magazine

In her most recent exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, entitled Pipelines and Permafrost, Mary Mattingly’s landscapes served as poignant reminders of the harsh effects of climate change. In staging the show, Mattingly took inspiration from core samples of earth for the grand dimensions and orientation of her images, each hung on the wall like a massive scroll, the tallest of them standing at over six feet.. With a closer look, it is evident that each column consists of various landscapes merged into a single picture’ elongated and exaggerated to resemble earth’s strata and provide a visual representation of how nature has changed at the hands of humans.

Read the full article here.

Hyperallergic Features Mary Mattingly

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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.

Read the full article here.

Mary Mattingly Featured in The Brooklyn Rail

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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.

Read more here.


Mike Mandel in the New Yorker

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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.

Click here to read the full article.

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

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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.

Click here for the full article.

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.

Click here for the full article.