Mary Mattingly: “House and Universe”

Exhibition review for Art in America, December 2013

Excerpt

“We’re probably doomed as humans if we don’t start thinking in a posthuman way,” Mary Mattingly posited during a recent “Art:21” documentary. Her grim assessment, a by-product of years spent independently studying the exploitation of workers and natural resources that propels consumption in the world’s affluent areas, is accompanied by ambitious experiments in imagining more sustainable means of subsistence. In the highly inventive tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Mattingly has fabricated futuristic “Wearable Homes”—protective suits equipped to guard against extreme temperatures, flooding, insects and bacteria—and mobile geodesic domes. Several such domes were mounted on the “Waterpod,” a retrofitted barge that carried the artist and her crew around New York City’s harbor for six months in 2009 as they tried to live self sufficiently on the vessel (growing food, recycling rainwater, etc.).

“House and Universe,” Mattingly’s third solo show with Robert Mann, reflected the artist’s environmental concerns in two sculptures and 15 photographs, many of which document her public projects. The photo Flock (2012), for example, features one of her floating structures. Atop a platform, two geodesic domes covered with white tarps and surrounded by containers of plants are engulfed by an expanse of sky and sea. Continent (2012) shows a barge and rafts subsumed in a murky fog; a sharp edge between the rippling waters and the solid background, among other Photoshopped aspects of the image, reveals the barren surroundings as an aesthetic frame. The unmoored vessel thus emerges as both a symbol of vulnerability and a privileged vantage point in these and several other of the show’s photographs, which evince a romantic tendency eclipsed by sheer purpose and will in the artist’s mobile environments. Yet, if Mattingly’s intentions are resolutely political, her photographs nonetheless evoke the spiritual.