Anyone traveling into New York City from one of the nearby airports can see that here is a natural wetland—one that happens to support millions of people. Rivers and waterways define the lay of the land, feeding into the very close Atlantic Ocean. So photographer Mary Mattingly’s Night Gardens (now showing at Robert Mann Gallery on 26th Street), in which groupings of plants are imagined in a riparian environment, is very much connected with reality. Fantasy comes in the saturated artifice of these glamorously lit, nocturnal compositions that have the mythical allure of dioramas at the Natural History Museum.
Photography by Mary Mattingly, courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery.
Seed heads are stars, alliums and dahlias are planets. Moss is primordial scrubland, or is it the sea bed? There is a curious, underwater feel to these works, which the artist put together by “merging cutouts, scans, fabric, and collaging them with photographs made through a fish tank.”
The staging is delightfully artificial, the atmosphere heightened, like a scene from a Powell and Pressburger movie (Black Narcissus to be precise, with those mountains). The artist describes these imagined worlds as “a universe in-between, where time and space, nature and artifice, history and future all overlap.”
The sottobosco world of Dutch painters of the 17th century is also evoked, not least the marvelously animated work of Otto Marseus van Schrieck. But there are no snakes and lizards here, and Mattingly’s prints are richly layered in themselves. Their focus is on adaption and resilience. “I wanted the prints in Night Gardens to depict how plants evolve amid changing climates,” she notes. “They depict gardens as spaces of survival and metamorphosis.”
Night Gardens is at the Robert Mann Gallery, New York, until February 7.
(Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)
