NEW YORK, NY.- Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation. Robert Mann Gallery is presenting Night Gardens, a solo exhibition of works by Mary Mattingly on view from December 12, 2024 through February 7, 2025.
Gardens produce food, medicine, fragrances of the earth—flowers, mulch, compost—textures, colors, and life. Birds, insects, and hidden movements stir in the dark, reminders that a garden is a world of its own. In this vibrant exhibition, Mattingly creates hyper-detailed images merging physical and digital realms into magical worlds.
The twelve images in this exhibition are set in riparian zones where biological life responds to shifting water levels; the stories of these precious ecosystems go back to ancient times. In some myths, lotuses and water lilies rise from waters. Similarly, the thistle, both cursed and cherished, embodies resilience, even dispelling melancholy with its roots.
Walking around Socrates Sculpture Park at twilight, the artist became inspired by the moonlit gardens. Mattingly took cuttings, scanned plants, painted and drew flowers, experimented with using fish tanks and mirrors, made flowers out of fabric, and used a digital program to further shape the subjects of her collages. Through these garden scenes, Mattingly “explores how disparate elements—ancient symbols, mythic blooms, evolving plants—come together to speak of survival, imagination, and transformation in a time of environmental upheaval. Night Gardens is an inquiry into the wild and shifting relationships between lifeforms, the self included.” In these images, Mattingly cultivates a garden that begins in reality and transforms into an ethereal myth of what could be. “The garden becomes a miniature world, echoing Foucault’s idea of a symbolic and even sacred enclosure—a universe in-between, where time and space, nature and artifice, history and future all overlap.”
Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at locations including the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Museo National de Belles Artes de la Habana, and the Palais de Tokyo among other venues. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series. She is a recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, A Blade of Grass, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Art Matters Foundation.
