PREVIEW: Mary Mattingly-Night Gardens
Combining a visual-art practice with environmental activism and education, Mary Mattingly wrote a manifesto that opens with the statement, “Art can transform people’s perceptions about value, and collective art forms can reframe predominant ideologies”. Mattingly’s determination to create alternative means of survival in the face of a dystopian future has resulted in various projects, from wearable cocoons that can store water and solar power to alternative urban infrastructure.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Robert Mann Gallery Archive
Walking around Socrates Sculpture Park at twilight, Mary Mattingly became inspired by the moonlit gardens. Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation. Gardens produce food, medicine, fragrances of the earth—flowers, mulch, compost—textures, colors, and life. Birds, insects, and hidden movements stir in the dark, reminders that a garden is a world of its own. In “Night Gardens” her solo exhibition, Mattingly creates hyper-detailed images merging physical and digital realms into magical worlds. The twelve images in the exhibition are set in riparian zones where biological life responds to shifting water levels; the stories of these precious ecosystems go back to ancient times. In some myths, lotuses and water lilies rise from waters. Similarly, the thistle, both cursed and cherished, embodies resilience, even dispelling melancholy with its roots. Mattingly took cuttings, scanned plants, painted and drew flowers, experimented with using fish tanks and mirrors, made flowers out of fabric, and used a digital program to further shape the subjects of her collages. Through these garden scenes, Mattingly “explores how disparate elements—ancient symbols, mythic blooms, evolving plants—come together to speak of survival, imagination, and transformation in a time of environmental upheaval. “Night Gardens” is an inquiry into the wild and shifting relationships between lifeforms, the self included.” In these images, Mattingly cultivates a garden that begins in reality and transforms into an ethereal myth of what could be. “The garden becomes a miniature world, echoing Foucault’s idea of a symbolic and even sacred enclosure—a universe in-between, where time and space, nature and artifice, history and future all overlap.”
Photo: Mary Mattingly, from the series “Night Garden”, 2023, Archival pigment print, © Mary Mattingly, Courtesy the artist and Robert Mann Gallery
Info: Robert Mann Gallery, 508 West 26th StreetSuite 9F, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/12/2024-7/2/225, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-16:00, www.robertmann.com/
