BIOGRAPHY

ROJECTS

Air Ship Air Cities, 33 Flatbush Rooftop, Public Project, Spring 2010
NYC Mayor’s Office of Special Projects, Waterpod Project, Summer 2009

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Robert Mann Gallery, Nomadographies, May 2009
Galerie Adler, Frankfurt, Germany "Frontier" October 2007
New York Public Library, NY, "Time Has Fallen Asleep" September 2007
White Box, NYC. "Fore Cast" December 2006
Robert Mann Gallery, NYC. "Second Nature" Jan. 2006
Feldman Gallery, Portland, OR. “We Go Round and Round” May 2005.
Lyonswiergallery, NYC. "The Stage" February 2003.
The New School, NY. "A New Breed" March 2002.
Media Arts Gallery, OR. "Valparaiso" January 2001.
Disjecta Art Center, OR. "Puppets" January 2001.
Higgins Gallery, OR. “Mary Mattingly” September 2000.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Tucson Museum of Art, AZ "Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord Between Nature and Society" 2009
Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. "Prix Pictet" Opens October 30, 2008,travels to Dubai and beyond.
s t a n d p o i n t, London, UK. "Mie Kjaergaard and Mary Mattingly" October 2008
Emergence, "G-77 Seed Bank" Governors Island, NY, May 2008
Neuberger Museum of Art, NY "Future Tense, Reshaping the Landscape" May 2008
ABC No Rio, NY "Groups and Collectives", Ides of March, 2008
3RD WARD, "31 Under 31" Brooklyn, NY, Curated by Lumi Tan and Jon Feinstein, March 2008
Video Visionen, O eins, Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany 2008
Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA, "Ecocentric" October, 2007
MOAB, Curated by Christy Gast, Tourist Information Television Station, UT, CA 2007
Like The Spice, NY "The Vereigated Landscape" curated Eric Lopresti, October 2007
Mattatuck Museum, "Other Worlds" June 2007
Robert Mann Gallery, "Epilogues" June 2007
Art Omi, "Bivouac" curated by Maximillion Goldfarb June 2007
Byblos, Miami curated Micaela Giovannotti,Joyce Korotkin "Out of True" December 2006
International Center for Photography, Triennial “Ecotopia” September 2006.
Istanbul Biennial, Turkey "Waterways and Beyond" October 2005
~scopeHamptons. “Lifeboat – Hamptons (Microscope)”July 2005.
Curated Mary Mattingly and Paul Middendorf
Venice Biennial, Italy “Waterways” Curated by Mary Mattingly, Renee Vara June 2005.
Postitions, Miami “Lifeboat” curated by Mary Mattingly/Paul Middendorf Dec 2004
RAM Gallerie/Foundation, Rotterdam “Small Works” October 2004.
Disjecta, Portland, OR “Jupiter Art Fair” October 2004.
The New York Hall of Sciences, NY “Tomorrow” October 2004.
HVCCA, Peekskill, NY “69 ChevyChevy Bang Bang” September 2004.
Rare Gallery, New York, NY “Nineteeneighty – Art Show” July 2004.
RAM Gallerie/Foundation, Rotterdam “Transforming Home” June 2004.
Duende Ateliers, Rotterdam, Holland “Mattingly/Dedes” March 2004.
ABC No Ria, New York, NY “Nineteeneighty” March 2004.
Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, NY “Controlled Chaos” February 2004.
Contemporary Art Museum,Tampa, FL "DNA: art & science - the double helix." 2004
Pamela Auchincloss Project Space, NY curated Koan-Jeff Bayista War Face Oct 2003.
Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY “New Directions ’03” October 2003.
University of the Arts Space 1401, PA “Best of Show” October 2003
Atlantic Conference, Brooklyn, NY. "Nineteeneighty" February 2003.
Parsons School of Design, NY. "Feast" April 2002.
Gallery at Yale, CT. "End of the Summer" July 2001.

BIBILOGRAPHY

Discovery Channel: Eating From the Future, September 30, 2009
Judith West, Mary Mattingly, Getting Your Money's Worth NYC, September 25, 2009
Bucky Buckaw's Backyard Chicken Broadcast: Hens On a Barge, September 19, 2009
NBC: Artists at Sea, September 10, 2009
Douglas Kelley Show, September 8, 2009
The Media Squat with Douglas Rushkoff, Interview with Mary Mattingly from the Waterpod Project, WFMU, 9/7 2009
Time Out New York Events, August 31, 2009
BBC News: Waterpod to Combat Rising Seas, August 30, 2009
Ben Johnson, 13 Hours Onboard Waterpod, Staten Island Advance,August 27, 2009
Brian Williams, Mary Mattingly on the Waterpod, MSNBC, August 25, 2009
James P Yates, Floating Ideas (Interview with Mary Mattingly), August 13, 2009
Melena Ryzik, Life and Art, Afloat on a Barge in the New York Harbor, New York Times, August 12, 2009
Steven Kurutz, A Fluid Definition of Self Sufficiency, New York Times, June 3, 2009
Kelly Loudenberg, Waterpod Interview Documentary, June 30, 2009
Time Out New York Perfect Weekend, July 18, 2009
Downtown Express Seaport Report, June 19, 2009
Anne on the Waterpod, Fox News, June 15, 2009
Daily News, June 13, 2009
Discover Magazine, June 12, 2009
Der Blaustrumpf, June 4, 2009
Shakthi Jothianandan, The Waterpod, Time Out New York, June 4, 2009
Karen Rosenberg, Mary Mattingly ‘Nomadographies’, New York Times, May 21, 2009
Vince Aletti, Mary Mattingly, The New Yorker, May 4, 2009
Datensklaven, April 9, 2009
New York Art Beat, April 3, 2009
Lauren O’neil-Butler, Mary Mattingly, Art Forum 500 Words, April 1, 2009
Actuo Photo, March 29, 2009
City Magazine, Young Bloods, November 2008
Le Prix Pictet & le développement durable / Nouvelle distinction pour les photographes, Photographie Magazine, July 2008
Prix Pictet Shortlist Winners, Financial Times, July 2008
VSD Magazine, "Vision d'artiste Apres le Deluge," July 2008
Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times, "Today's Landscapes, Tomorrow's Dystopia," June 1, 2008
Earth Bytes: Engaging Dystopia, Sun Valley Plum, May 2008
Gundel-Maria Busse, Schon Und Schrecklich, “Main Echo”, December 2007
Von Sylvia Staude, Holt Uns Endlich Ab, “Frankfurter Rundschau”, November 2007
Le Monde Magazine, France "Faut-Il Climatiser La Terre?" Cover/story, Novbember 2007
InterCommunication Magazine, Japan,"Ecology:Communication with Nature", Nov 2007
Drome Magazine, Italy "Frontier, Mary Mattingly" November 2007
Miranda Sharp, Work by Mary Mattingly, C-Photo Magazine, September 2007
Stephen Vincent Kobasa, New Haven Advocate. “Stranger Than Truth," July 19, 2007
Cover story by Jackie Delematre, Gimme Shelter, “New York Press”, April 2007
Japanese Esquire Magazine, "Photography in New York," April 2007
Karen Rosenberg, An Inconvenient Half-Truth, New York Magazine, September 2006
Brigid Hughes, A Solution to an Inconvenient Truth, A Public Space, September 2006
Ecotopia, Aperture, September 2006
Martha Schwendener, Mary Mattingly - Robert Mann Gallery, Artforum, March 2006
Eric Gelber, Eric Gelber on Mary Mattingly at Robert Mann Gallery, Artcritical.com, February 2006
Joshua Johnson, January 2006, "Mary Mattingly at Robert Mann".
The New York Sun, January 2006 - "Second Nature at Robert Mann Gallery." Art Center Nabi, Korea. "Fast Forward Conference - Future Architectures" 2005. Artnet.com, July
The Orgonian, May 2005. “Shows of Note – We Go Round and Round in the Night.”
The Portland Mercury, May 2005. Review, We Go Round and Round in the Night.
Photography Quarterly, March 2004 – Cover and article – Mary Mattingly.
London Photographic Awards, Mary Mattingly 2004 Jury London Photographic.
Archis Magazine, Winter 2004, Single Issue Space.
The Photo Review, Fall 2003, 2003 Photographic Winners by Stephen Perloff.
Poughkeepsie Journal, Oct 18, 2003, “‘Landscapes Dominate” by Rebecca Rothbaum.
Village Voice, February 26, 2003, Mary Mattingly by Vince Alletti.
The NW Drizzle, July 2002, "Berlin, Seattle and the bathroom…" by J.V. Jahn.
Photo District News, May 2002, Photographers of the Year Award.

AWARDS

New York University Artist-In-Residence, 2008. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 2007-2008. Braziers International Artist Residency, Oxfordshire, England, 2007. Experimental TV. Center, New York, 2005. Duende Residency, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Grant for Photographic Studies, Parsons, New York. Yale School of Art Fellowship, May 2001. Opal Filteau Photography Scholarship, 2001. The Stephen Swirling Award for Digital Arts, 2001.

LECTURES/CONFERENCES/ARTIST TALKS
MOMA Education Department, November 2009
Syracuse University, November 2009
NYU Donna Goodman’s “Green Design and Planning” course, November 2009
Brooklyn Utopias, The Old Stone House, Mary Mattingly and Ian Daniel, October 2009
Vancouver CAC, Mary Mattingly on the Waterpod” September 2009
Cornell University, Mary Woods’s “What Would Gordon (Matta Clark) Do?” August 2009
Terreform, “Mary Mattingly” July 2009
Panel "31 Under 31" moderated by Amy Stein, 3RD WARD, March 2008
Artist talk, New York Public Library, October 2007
Artist talk, Braziers Workshop, Oxfordshire, UK, August 2007
Panel discussion on Art and Politics, The Canal Chapter, New York, NY, September 2007
Nayland Blake with Mary Mattingly, International Center of Photography, October 2006
Panel on Art Versus Design, organizer Elizabeth Ackerman, Block Party Brooklyn Design, July 2006
Robert Mann Gallery, New York, on Second Nature, January 2006
Amanda Baum's 1st grade class with Collector Circle, New Jersey, January 2006
Collector Circle, New York September 2005.
Barnes and Nobel – Glocal Mapping Territories - G-77, CTheory, August 2005.
Fast Forward. London Conference Series. Summer 2005 series.
Feldman Gallery, Portland, OR. May 2005.
Duende Ateliers, Rotterdam, Holland May 2004.
Pacific Northwest College of Art, OR. February 2002.
Stephens Art Annex, OR. May 2002.

TEACHING
2007 International Center of Photography, “The Constructed Moment”, Masterclass.

LINKS

marytmattingly@yahoo.com

< robert mann gallery

G-77

BLOGS

marymattingly.com

waterways

RECENT INTERVIEWS

Interview with Cynthia Roznoy from the Mattatuck Museum 5/07:

Photography is your primary medium. Has this always been the case? Kindly describe any art school/art world influence that affected this choice of medium. Where does video fit in?
I studied photography and new media in many different schools, partly influenced by my father who works in a variety of digital forms, and partly because these were somewhat more practical and less esoteric fields than, for example, painting felt to me at the time. I grew up in a very rural community with overriding practical values and not much exposure to any present day art world. I spent a lot of time with writing, had business plans for a fashion line, and every type of photography portfolio. It really wasn't until I started combining all of my interests and studies did I realize that in fact this is what art is. It wasn’t until then that I really started to pursue and codify an art life.
In my artwork I will use any medium to realize an idea, however, I usually finalize a piece through photography, video, or sculpture because these mediums, to me, allow for a direct translation of reality or of a created real-space and because they either represent the world around us or sit in the world around us, they carry a truth. Photography and video have an inherent honesty – we continue to want to believe what looks believable. Manipulating “reality” within these mediums to create futuristic scenes allows for the ability to provide latent meaning. Indelible, purposeful and fantastic.

Who have you studied with? at Yale/Norfolk?
At Yale/Norfolk I studied under David Hilliard, Sam Messer, Valerie Hammond, and Jake Berthot. Some other influential teachers have been Dorothy Imagire from Connecticut, Carole Liucci from Connecticut, Dianne Kornberg from Oregon, Cynthia Pachikara from Michigan, and Penelope Umbrico from New York.

Your work provides a vision of the future. Has this always been an abiding interest? If not, what other subjects interested you and what instigated the shift to futuristic subject matter?
My work has always been an interleaving of the past, present and future, understanding that the future is imminent and immanent. I have always practiced some form of future scenario-planning, and have always been environmentally and politically concerned in my life and art. Out of everything that interests me, some things tend to frighten me, and the things that frighten me tend to eat away at me. It is those things I usually end up making work about. It’s obscenely frightening to see an aerial view of the sprawling Las Vegas suburbs, to think of the sustainable desert nature that was once there, and to see how nondescript and bland our created space there is. In turn it is amazing to think about what humans can do technologically. This one image spawns many creative thoughts and questions for me: Why are so many people attracted to these communities? Is it through political views? Mass Media? Fashion? A unified language? Economics? All of these things? What will be the result of many of these spaces? As for fashion and photography, two of my early and remaining interests, what will be the result of a constant deluge of image? The result of a blandification and ubiquitousness of the product? Of an illusionistic creation of a self, a personality, through these products, whether they be clothes, cultural stamps, or other decorations?

I read that Ray Kurzweil's work is a consideration for you. Please describe how you know his work and the ways in which your art might further, reflect, his thinking or how it shares with your philosophy.
Marshall McLuhan said, “When an environment is new, we perceive the old one for the first time.” McLuhan also wrote at great length about Continuity in Discontinuity, or chiasmus: the reversal-of-process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. Kurzweil states that, with the exponential acceleration of development in technology and so-called progress, the human condition will reach a point when we can no longer process our environment from our present perspective as the accelerating speed of growth outpaces our faculties. However, Bertrand Russell made an excellent point, saying that if the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream. Perhaps it is only with the acceleration of change that we can notice and react to it. Finally, Vernor Vinge defines the Singularity as the postulated point or short period in our future when our self-guided evolutionary development accelerates enormously. The Singularity, though, has been a condition felt by humans that perhaps began before Gutenberg, with alphabets, cave paintings, with artistic expressions that removed us from ourselves, and with the Greeks who abstracted and objectified nature by creating their own cosmos. With these advances, humans need and accept history as myth and an “electric merger of past present and future become today”. In 1962, the philosopher William Barrett used an image of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture to illustrate his book, Irrational Man. Irrational Man is a story told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead. When the condition of existentialism was defined (maybe with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the first half of the 19th century, described by philosopher Edmund Husserl and his student Heidegger, but perhaps we finally had a poster-boy with Jean-Paul Sartre), we understood Ivan Turgenev’s nihilism, which Heidegger defines well as "there is nothing left of Being as such," and we understood existentialism as the consciousness of death, the purposlessness of life, the individual construction of identity to fill the void of meaninglessness. Giacometti was a friend of existential and surrealist writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and André Breton. The discussion of human civilization evolved from a human-death dilemma to human-machine civilization. Kurzweil is predicting singularity as a future happening, but as far as I can tell, it is already here and will continue to grow. The singularity has been depicted by artists from Giacometti to Bellmer, to Friedrich, Goya, Godard, to some interpretations of Ad Reinhard’s black paintings, to name just a few. Technology aids in abstracting us from our face-to-face community, and can be a surrogate for real people. When people are imbedded with different forms of technology, from the wireless to the plastic to the drug, and when we procreate solely outside of the body, we just continue the abstraction from nature and person that began before the Greeks invented the cosmos.
Ray Kurzweil’s notion of the singularity has always interested me. Other definitions of singularity include:
Mathematical Singularity - a point where a mathematical function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved.
Technological Singularity - a theoretical point in the development of a scientific civilization at which technological progress accelerates into infinity or beyond prediction. This is believed to occur when artificial intelligence or intelligence amplification reaches a certain level.
Singularity - (operating system) - an operating system research project by Microsoft.
Gravitational Singularity (physics) - an infinity occurring in an astrophysical model, involving infinite curvature (a mathematical singularity) in the space/time continuum, namely black holes, white holes and worm holes.
According to the standard big-bang theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. Singularities are thought to be zones of infinite density that exist at the core of "black holes." The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density. Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, and infinitely dense. (http://www.big-bang-theory.com/ and www.wikipedia.org)

Kindly describe your work process: please include choice of topic, setting of scene, and photographing technique (film, computer manipulation).
I begin with a specific or more general story I need to tell or feeling I want to evoke. I then build sculptures or collect images to create a physical or virtual space-composite – a new place. I do not have a set way of creating, but I will often begin with sketches, then create sculptures, then photograph and videotape them either on a seamless background or in a “natural” setting. I will create performances to take place within the setting to be documented. I digitize the film and the video and then work with them from there to hone, specify, and blend. I can think of no better exploration of my current process than to show you this photo of the walls and ceiling of my current workspace, which, since losing my studio in January during a large real estate deal, has been my apartment.

Are there influences from other photographers (historical? Contemporary?)
Certain images stand out to me. Jeff Wall’s “A Sudden Gust of Wind” and “After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison”, Gregory Crewdson’s “Untitled 1999” depicting a man digging up his living room and “Untitled 2002” of a woman floating in her flooded home, the photography of Simen Johan, Thomas Demand, Hans Bellmer, and Mariko Mori. The art that I make is influenced by a number of things, ranging from painters like Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch and Pieter Bruegel to contemporary artists like Paul Chan and Thomas Hirshhorn, designers like Bruce Mau, playwrights and directors like Peter Sellars, architects like Rem Koolhaas, corporate literature like Monsanta’s annual reports, blogs like Slashdot and worldchangding to writers like Jerry Meander, theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Katherine Hayles and Paul Virilio, futurists like Ray Kurzweil.

Is there a (an intentional?) narrative? Describe some themes.
The eminent loss of nature and communication, the proliferation of the man made and the machine made, the dependence of people on the machine, the constant balancing and measuring of humankind’s potential for creation and destruction. The automation of society and resulted loss of survival skills, the reuse of archaic technologies, the indifference of people and the acceptance of the calm after destruction.

How do describe your personal (is it the same or does it differ from your artistic) view of the future? Does this affect how you live (?green)?
I try to live very humanely, in my interactions with others, with animals, and with nature. I am currently working on a project called Waterpod. It really describes how I live, and my goals.

Julie Fishkin at Sadie Magazine:

"It seems strange to position and categorize your work based on the fact hat you're a woman and under thirty-one. Do you think those criteria figure in your work?"

I looked at the show and its parameters as just one of many ways curatorial groups use a set of rules to survey the dynamics of a certain time and place. “31 Under 31 Women in Photography” is a very open-ended platform to base a show on, and not what my work is about, so I did read the show as more of a survey of contemporary work that would perhaps illuminate some trends or specific lineages between my generation and an other generations of photographers.

"Is there such a thing as a woman photographer, I mean, besides the obvious facts? Does this come with any sensibilities?"

I don’t think so. I think that given the history of feminism and where we are now in that dialogue, there is such a thing as, for example, a feminist dialogue within photography that deals with gender, but there is not a distinct look or sensibility of a photographer that is also a woman. That said, gender roles can almost always be read into an image of people, and at this point it is just embedded in our cultural mindset to read images on that level.

"How did you choose what work of yours to put into this show? Did the thematic parameters influence your choice?"

I picked eight works: a selection of my favorite pieces and some new work. I think that the curators picked an interesting piece for the show. To me, “The Hunt” is a complex picture. It depicts a woman hunting for fish with a net while a flock of birds fight amongst each other over their recent kill. She represents a return to the primal hunter-gatherer but in a time when this typology cyclically returns as a way of life and survival. This picture also represents the mostly nonexistent relationship between people and the animal world, but the birds could easily be a substitute for humans.

"Did you know March is Women's History Month? Doing anything special?"

Yes, history in general is very important to me. Being a woman and closely understanding some of the struggles of women, Woman’s History Month has personal significance. I am currently working on a large collaborative project (actually with three other women) that will occupy most of this month for me, but I am reading a book by Hannah Arendt and may revisit Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”.

"When did you first pick up your camera to start shooting? Is that the best way to observe your world, or the world?"

My father remembers teaching me on his Pentax K1000 when I was eight years old. We would go to a lake near the house I grew up in and shoot photographs of the water. I especially remember the foliage in the fall that surrounded the lake. Photography is an amazing way to see the world. Every moment can be isolated, saved, reviewed, written and rewritten, changed and created.