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Swartley Gallery Series Features Mary Mattingly

Next up in the 2015-2016 Swartley Gallery Series is multimedia artist Mary Mattingly’s “House and Universe”, an exhibit featuring photography and mixed media sculpture with an ecological focus in the gallery of D-E’s Swartley Arts Center. The Connecticut-born, New York City-based artist was previously a visiting artist in the D-E Summer Connections program’s inaugural Young Visionaries Experience, where she worked alongside interdisciplinary artist Sally Bozzuto and the students to design, build and garden two planter boxes in the lawn outside Swartley - one of which will remain on campus while the other will join the “floating food forest for New York called ‘Swale’”, as mentioned on Mattingly’s website, www.marymattingly.com.

“House and Universe”, which opened on February 8, will be up until March 18, with an artist talk and reception on Monday, February 29.  This Artist Talk will be from 3:30 - 5:00 PM on the Massoud Steps in the Hajjar STEM Center.  Below is the artist’s biography and information regarding the exhibit:

In her exhibition “House and Universe”, multimedia artist Mary Mattingly weaves together lush digital photography with experimental design to tackle real-world environmental issues in ways that are both radical and pragmatic. Mattingly imagines a world of imminent vicissitude, in which humanity must become reliant on a collective ingenuity in order to survive floods, war, and the inevitable decay of the urban habitat. Yet in the vein of other conceptual utilitarians like Andrea Zittel and Anish Kapoor, she proposes solutions that marry carefully-researched, sustainable functionality with succinctly elegant and elegiac forms. Her photographs reconcile apparent contradictions: both sumptuous and austere, they are at once warnings of material excess and celebrations of its adaptability.

Imaginative reinvention of objects forms the backbone of Mattingly's most recent public project, “Triple Island”, which opened July 20th on Pier 42 in Lower Manhattan and continues through November 2013. Like its predecessors, the 2012 “Flock House Project” and 2009's “Waterpod™”, “Triple Island” proposes adaptable living spaces for an increasingly unstable environment. Inhabited by Mattingly and other volunteers from the artistic community, all three constructions have utilized gray water, solar power, and other low-impact systems to sustain habitable conditions in urban spaces like piers, parking lots, and city squares. By digitally collaging photographs of “Triple Island” and the Flock Houses with new environments, Mattingly begins to blur the boundary between documentation and fiction.

Mattingly recently participated in MoMA PS1's "Expo 1" in collaboration with Triple Canopy Magazine, received a Knight Foundation Grant for her "WetLand" project that opens next summer on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, and represented smARTpower in the Philippines, in conjunction with the Bronx Museum and the US State Department. Her first “ART21: New York Close Up” documentary video was released in July 2013. Mattingly's work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Seoul Art Center, The New York Public Library, the Palais de Tokyo, Tucson Museum of Art, and the deCordova Museum. Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, China Business News, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Financial Times, Le Monde Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, and on BBC News, MSNBC, Fox News, News 12, NPR, WNBC, New York 1, and ART21. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art series.

For more information, contact Visual Arts faculty member and Swartley Gallery Coordinator Caitlyn Young at youngc@d-e.org.
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