Mary Mattingly Exhibition

Mary Mattingly Exhibition

BRIC

This event has ended.

CURATED BY: JENNY GEROW

Brooklyn-based artist Mary Mattingly creates photographs, sculpture, and large-scale public art projects addressing climate change by drawing connections between the social and economic forces that make up the current political ecology impacting our environment. Mattingly works with a communal approach, a compelling model to urge viewers to rethink our relationship to the environment and to each other. The centerpiece of this exhibition, a deconstructed and creatively transformed 19,000-pound light medium tactical vehicle (LMTV, a military cargo truck), acts to provoke a reimagining of public life, centering on the existence of objects with violent histories. The LMTV is meant to be understood as a component reflecting a little visible but ever expanding global market for minerals and their complex supply chains (military and otherwise). Through this object, the artist poses a big question: What happens when an object that embodies both the systemic violence represented by war and and by climate change is manifested in a public space? The vehicle - used in the Gulf and Afghan wars and made in the U.S. by Oshkosh Defense - was collaboratively re-designed by nine artists and activists into a platform for performance. Throughout the run of the exhibition, programming by these artists and across BRIC will be presented on the platform. The activation of an object with such a loaded history will further challenge our ability to collectively reenvision our environment in the present and future. When we’re able to change the form and function of an object with a violent and complex history, it can be powerful. Can it become ritual? Can it be healing?

Mary Mattingly is a Brooklyn-based visual artist best known for Swale, a floating food forest for New York. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, the Palais de Tokyo, and in the Havana Biennial, among many other institiutions. With the U.S. Department of State and Bronx Museum of the Arts she participated in the smARTpower project, traveling to Manila. In 2009 Mattingly founded the Waterpod Project, a barge-based public space and self-sufficient habitat that hosted over 200,000 visitors in New York. Mattingly has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Yale University School of Art, the Harpo Foundation, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, and the Art Matters Foundation. Her work has been featured in Aperture magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture, The New York Times, New York, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Brooklyn Rail, and the Village Voice; and on BBC News, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, WNBC, NY1, and on Art21’s New York Close Up series.

Media

• Drawing
• Photography
• Sculpture

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