Inspired by the moonlit walks around the Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), artist Mary Mattingly has created a series of hyper-detailed images, which merge physical and digital realms into magical worlds. Mattingly, a contemporary artist is best known for large-scale sculptures of ecosystems and imagined futures.
By means of her exquisite 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”. By means of her works, Mattingly cultivates a garden that begins in reality and transforms into an ethereal myth of what could be.
“In Night Gardens, I explore gardens through the lens of underwater life and flooding riparian zones, imagining how plants might migrate, mutate, and adapt in a rapidly changing climate. The photographs, layered and collaged with fish tanks, mirrors, digital techniques, and cut-outs, blend elements of myth and nature, creating an interplay between randomness and cultivation,” explains the artist.
Mattingly’s twelve collages feature riparian zones where biological life responds to shifting water levels, the stories of which go back to ancient times featuring myths, such as those surrounding lotuses and water lilies rising from the waters – Re, the Egyptian sun god. Her vibrant works invite the visitor to delve into the enchantment of gardens after dark.
Mattingly has exhibited at 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. She writes for publications such as Nature and is a recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, A Blade of Grass, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Art Matters Foundation.
The exhibition is on view at the Robert Mann Gallery until the 7th of February, 2025.