Mary Mattingly
Mary Mattingly is an artist who co-builds floating food forests, photographs fictional worlds, and is determined to keep imagining utopia.
Why, in this moment of compressed time and a feeling of vertigo, do I dwell in the dense pages of a seventeenth-century compendium of sadness? If it is, in part, to turn away from the day’s edicts, it is also to begin to come to terms with an agony I try to bury, and one that surfaces, more insistently, among people I love. Robert Burton’s taxonomy gives me a language for both psychic weather and civic climates that choreograph appearance, lingering, and withdrawal.
Photography has the ability to replicate and scale. It is a story, provocation, construction, fabrication, and truth.
The title of Ana Mendieta: Traces, which catalogs her exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, indicates the protean wanderings, vagaries, and mutability found in her art, which inhabits an impermanent, profane, and connected body. The monograph details her better-known work, as well as rarely seen ephemera, notes, and letters which together present a complex view of her positions within feminism and the political sphere.
Visitors to the Ai Weiwei retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D. C. are offered two varied forms of learning additional information: a traditionally produced hardcover book ($39.95) and a double-stapled magazine format ($5).
Notes From a Future, after an unstoppable progression towards one art world extreme and a necessary alternative.
Take a cue from Occupy Wall Street set up your tent in any privately owned public space.
