SECOND NATURE

FUTURE IMPERFECT Mary Mattingly's digitally manipulated photographs are on display in "Second Nature." Their subject matter is "the distant future of the human race." In her imagined future, industrial civilization has fallen and people live as nomads, wearing their homes on their backs like snails. Ms. Mattingly creates these scenes by first sewing costumes, designing machinery, and posing the characters in each scene. The resulting photographs are tweaked digitally to create the final products on display. Through Saturday, February 25, Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Robert Mann Gallery, 210 Eleventh Ave., between 24th and 25th streets, 212-989-7600.

Mary Mattingly at Robert Mann by joshua johnson

Evoking a post-Katrina New Orleans scavenged by Techno-nomads was probably not Mary Mattingly’s intention, but that image gives credence to her ability to produce work with hermeneutic flexibility. Now showing at the Robert Mann gallery, Mattingly produces work that draws from a variety media and disciplines. Her digitally manipulated photographs give us a glimpse of a water-soaked world where the boundaries between nature and technology blur and become indistinguishable. These images, often hazy and heavy with atmosphere, open into a near deserted world, where lonely travelers, dressed in costumes that recall something between the movie Dune and Pieter Brueghal, attempt to survive on the gleanings of a post-globalized society.

Mattingly, in her writings, often confronts the increasing homogenization of culture, and the destruction of the environment as major sources of inspiration for her work. Perhaps, then, it is not so far off to draw parallels with New Orleans when approaching these images. The disaster that is Katrina may have been the result, not only of a distressed environment, but also of a political system that is increasing nationalistic in a globalized world. Let us not forget that Washington has focused most of its energies on the war in Iraq (a go-at-it-alone war that has lead to no small amount of ill-will in the rest of the world), leaving FEMA with reduced resources and incompetent management. The sort of post-apocalyptic culture that Mattingly envisions is a kind of cautionary moral, warning us of the dangers of the rapidly changing political and environmental landscape.

That is not to say that her work is didactic in any sense. The themes that Mattingly has touched upon, while contemporary, also maintain a sense of timelessness. Her work draws upon the sort of binary opposites essential to the structural properties of mythology—nature vs. technology, man vs. nature, etc.—and weaves them into a cohesive aesthetic. Like Matthew Barney, her work builds upon the new media experiments of the last decade, and, rather than focusing on their formal characteristics, wields them in service of a larger narrative. This narrative, while it carries a warning, also holds the hope that the continuing intersection of cultures and the environment generates a world where man, however lonely he may seem, can still survive, even when he appears lost in the sea.

Links: http://www.marymattingly.com and http://www.robertmann.com