SECOND NATURE

TEXT BY:

HERBERT LUST

Mattingly’s new work is exciting on many levels. The colors in the prints are unique and complex. They saunter and whisper like silence breathing. The installation itself proceeds by contradictions: joyful yet sad, large yet small, rising yet sinking. Very meditative. Mattingly is a new and challenging voice.

ESSAY BY:

RENEE VARA

“There is no exponential linearity of human progress, even less so for art, where the linear function has always been a problem. No one ever thought that art was going from one point to another, with a final destination” Jean Buadrilliard, “Art Between Utopia and Anticipation,” 1996

Mary Mattingly’s work does not take a position - but not from a seat of apathy but as the emblematic sign of a larger cultural stigma: ambivalence. Mattingly’s work suggests both an ecstatic embrace and repulsion for what technology has accomplished and promulgated in the post-industrial society. It is not a personal position, but rather a cultural space - that she occupies and inhabits, both literally and figuratively. And it is within that space - that we all occupy, whether willing or not, whether conscious or not. And we live with that ambiguity everyday which differs from the modern dialectic of extreme - as it replicates itself in repetitive acts where rebellion and extremism to the modernist fear of the humanist become and represent repetitive acts which each time they are repeated loose their authenticity and their validity but become victims of the same repetition as all of us are beholden.
Mattingly’s photos incorporate this cultural performance - as technology due to its ties to systems of governance, beaucracy and capitalism - and what our culture obsesses itself with - “progress”. But all this does is create or put our lives, our minds and health, environment, nature - INTO A LOOP - which moves between the two poles of euphoria and repulsion. Its no longer a culture that can propose a stasis which has a line of progression. Mattingly’s take is that the notion of modernism: as defined by technology, architecture, branding and advertising, are an emblem of progress and development that has situated us in a reoccurring loop of systems. All are associated with a high and a low, not in a sense of cultural representation but rather in a syanestetic experience of alienation and greater connections, improvement and greater degradation of natural resources, faster movement and greater desire for stability, freedom and the constant feeling of imprisonment. Her singular dystopic worlds resonate with individuals who like the freedom to be equipped with their wearable homes and allow a cultural independence, but are also have equipment, which is literally and philosophically heavy, strapping their bodies with an unnatural burden of physicality.
Mattingly’s work acknowledges and accepts that the modernist myth of technology as a sign and vector toward progress is gone and is mere historic pastime. There is no postmodern debate. And now our cultural prognosis is in a never ending loop - of “evolution” which leads to “devolution” - and it just goes “round and round” in circle flavored with optimism and nostalgia but inevitably becomes tempered by pessimism and hope. Although many of us empirically know this, we have been born into the myth of modernism, and just don’t want nor can see it in the same picture. Mattingly’s work allows us to visualize it - as a landscape, a future, a prognosis. Her work, which combines seamlessly the historical technologies of traditional and digital photographies, embodies this mutiplicity in her working process: the dead is resurrected and the new is interpreted. Her work suggests a complexity and represents the mechanical output, the photgraph. This circularity nor her vistas do not cease - but rather suggest and infinity - as we try to progress or solve medical issues with greater technological advances of medication - we quickly lose that empathy of doctors and medical care professionals. As teachology and research allows for economists and statisticians to “quantify” cultural occurrences, it often discounts the need and room for natural variance and social, psychological and individual differences. As the dominant states in a state of progress, it leads to the rise of the alternative, which also rises and responds. As secularization is stabilized by the economies of capitalism, fundamentalism responds from a sociological impulse and desire for the nostalgic past.
Mattingly’s work, however, is not didactic. It is work that is not about judgment. It is about the collusion of those impulses of our culture - as fueled by technology - and the systems which support and benefit technology. Just as Mattingly reaches the infinite, her work and philosophy suggested that our culture is at a static point of never-ending change.