NYAB Event - Mary Mattingly & Michael Cataldi "Process and Progress"

Mary Mattingly & Michael Cataldi "Process and Progress"

Bronx Art Space

This event has ended.

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) presents Process and Progress: Mary Mattingly & Michael Cataldi, the fourth in the series of five exhibitions that invites artists and architects to engage with systems of urban development in the Bronx and beyond.

The exhibition series, Process and Progress: Engaging in Community Change, highlights the Bronx River Art Center's development during a time of significant structural and cultural change in the borough. BRAC's major building renovation project, now underway, is leading the way for more environmentally sustainable and technologically advanced designs within the West Farms Community. At the same time, the surrounding area has become home to new and imminent urban development projects that plan to dramatically alter the landscape and its residential makeup. A proposed real estate development located across the street from BRAC's facility will be the largest housing complex initiative in the Bronx since Co-op City, one of the largest cooperative housing developments in the world. In addition, the West Farms Rapids section of the Bronx River Greenway, slated to open alongside our facility in the near future, will allow direct access to the river and will link BRAC with the Bronx Zoo and other important sites in the borough along a new corridor of green space. These developments will inevitably transform the social fabric and cultural composition of our community.

Artist and architect Mary Mattingly and Michael Cataldi have individually researched these and other urban development projects in the West Farms area during a focused one-month period. For the fourth exhibition in the series Process and Progress, the artists created new works that are directly informed by their time engaged with the neighborhood.

As metaphor for the current cycle of rebuilding in this part of the Bronx, Mary Mattingly is collecting objects around West Farms and the Bronx River Art Center to build a new artistic form, narrating a not-so-distant future when resources largely exist in landfills and preexisting objects are repurposed to build our surroundings. Objects discarded around the neighborhood may imply stories about the individuals who once owned them, but say more about the framework of production, distribution, human wants, human needs and the larger advertising apparatus. How are our exteriors, tools, and relationships reflected by daily commerce? While each object carries its own narrative of identification, travel, and traumas with it, individual stories merge along the route of production and can reach a communal understanding about a place when accumulated.

Michael Cataldi's project, Disposition, explores the provenance of place and image. The works center around a site, 1525 West Farms Road, an address without a building, a thin slice of land, a natural rock wall overgrown with weeds and bearing the chisel marks of forgotten labors. Disposition -the legal act of transferring property- takes as its subject the transfer of this site from state property to private property where it will be incorporated into the largest housing development built in the city since 1968.

Media

• Installation
• Other

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