Katie's Phantastical Photos

For my project I decided to compare and contrast two contemporary artists who have both done works that combine several different art forms. These two artists cross boundaries the boundaries of sculpture, ecology, performance and documentation. Each with the same end result, their pieces are meant to create an impact, either upon the current community or the future population.

Mary Mattingly, my first artist, was born in 1978 and is nationally known for her pieces. Originally born in Rockville, Connecticut, she now works and lives in New York. She has studied at Parsons School of Design in New York, and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. She is also the recipient of a Yale University School of Art Fellowship. In her own personal style, Mattingly explores the themes of home, travel, cartography, and humans' relationships with each other, with the environment, with machines, and with corporate and political entities. She has been recognized for creating photographs and sculptures depicting and representing futuristic and obscure landscapes. Some of her other pieces include making wearable sculptures, also known as "wearable homes”, which “examine the cohesive threads of cultures’ and groups’ clothing throughout the world; from Inuit cultures to saris in India, Muslim, Hindu, Zen Buddhist garments, American Gap, Banana Republic, the Khaki Overcoat, muslin design prototypes, construction uniforms, kimonos, Dockers, safari camouflage, military uniforms, the blandification and brandification of garments spanning cultures worldwide to make one, general look de-emphasizing self and re-emphasizing everything else (collaboration, ideas, survival, modularity, etc.)”

She is widely known for her ecological installations, including the Waterpod (2009). Her work has been shown at: the International Center of Photography, New York; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; the New York Public Library; and in exhibitions in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy, and Dubai. She also has had one-person exhibitions at: Robert Mann Gallery, New York; White Box, New York; Galerie Adler, Frankfurt, Germany, The New School, New York, and other exhibition spaces. In September 2006, the artist's piece titled "The New Mobility of Home" was the cover image of the International Center of Photography's Triennial titled "Ecotopia.”

Mattingly was selected as a shortlist finalist in the inaugural Prix Pictet global environmental photography competition (2008). She has been awarded artist-residency grants at: New York University; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York; Braziers International, Oxfordshire, England; and Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, CT. In December 2006, she released a multimedia opera at White Box in New York titled Fore Cast. Fore Cast was positioned as an environmental disaster opera and featured an art installation with music and performances depicting World War IV which was predicted by Albert Einstein:"I don't know what World War III will be fought with, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." The gallery was filled with water, sand, and tree stumps with a circular projection that covered the space.

The piece I chose to analyze from her is called the Waterpod. From June through September 2009, Mattingly led a NY-based multinational team of artists, designers, builders, civic activists, scientists, environmentalists, and marine engineers to launch the Waterpod, a free, participatory New York Citywide event docking in all 5 boroughs at Governors Island. Designed as a new habitat for the global warming epoch, the Waterpod represented a sustainable, sculptural art and technology habitat, with as many as four artists living on and off it, generating food, water, and power in a contained and self-sufficient environment.

While focusing on collaborative artistic projects, the resident artists emphasized the repurposing and transformation of all forms of materials. The Waterpod included space for: community and artistic activities; eco-initiatives including food grown with collected rainwater, and gray water recycling, with energy provided from environmental and human sources; and an artists’ residence. A critical intent of the Waterpod was to showcase the importance of water and the natural world, while serving as a model of an autonomous living system. The Waterpod is proof of human creativity united with artistic talent; it connects our modern resources to ecologically and sustainable living. It appears to combine technology and art, and is a model for a new living standard. Originally just for the purpose of displaying how important our natural resources are, I can now see that the Waterpod prepares for a different future. With our world becoming more populated, and acceptable living space decreasing, the Waterpod could indeed become a model for bigger living containers in the future.

Heathey Dewey-Harborg, my second artist, is an information artist who is interested in exploring art as research and public inquiry. Traversing media ranging from algorithms to installation, her work seeks to question fundamental assumptions underpinning perceptions of human nature, technology and the environment. She has a BA in Information Arts from Bennington College and a Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University where she currently teaches as an Adjunct Professor.

“Inspired early on by the work of John Cage, it has long been my goal to work towards a kind of autonomous artwork: the work of art as a total system acknowledging human participation as only one component in a much greater ecology. I am interested in art that feeds off the sun and the wind; art that changes and evolves and learns from its environment. Ultimately, a concept of art that can teach us something about the life unnoticed in our surroundings. This is my long-term goal, to bring installation, artificial intelligence, biology and ecology together into evolving artistic systems” –H.Dewey-Harborg She is primarily interested in exploring art as research and public inquiry. Examining culture through the lens of information, Heather creates situations embodying concepts, freed from the artist's hand. Heather has displayed work at Third Ward, Galapagos, The Texas Firehouse Gallery, Fotofono, The Gowanus Studio Space, and the Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Artist Television Access, California College of the Arts and Dorkbot in San Francisco, Bennington College in Vermont, and Sculpture Space and SUNYIT in Utica, NY. Heather has received grants from the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Bennington Student Endowment for the Arts. She received a National Science Foundation award for the RESNA student design competition and ITP/TSOA as well as Tisch Achievement Scholarships from New York University. She has also been awarded artist residencies at the General Store gallery in Elk Horn Iowa and Sculpture Space in Utica New York where she was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

The work I chose to focus on by Heather Dewey-Harborg is titled Stranger Visions. In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance. An ongoing project, Stranger Visions is a current project that is still underway in the present. Viewed as a scientific experiment is a conceptual investigation, this work is a conceptual exploration. In analysis, “Stranger Visions” is meant to bring light to the genetic wonders of the human body and how they are artistic in an abstract way. The importance of recognizing the artistic world around us is constantly brought to awareness. This way artists can always find creativity in the small matters around us, and not always feel the need to create something new in order to call it art.

What I admire about both of these artists is their motivation, perseverance and the energy they put into each work of art. Not only do they consider the impact they will have on their present community, but for the future as well. Mary Mattingly planned for the Waterpod to enlighten our current population to the housing crisis, how our planet is constantly becoming more and move overpopulated, but the living space we have for all these people is rapidly decreasing. With her projects, Heather Dewey-Harborg is determined to make people think about the world they have around them, and see the significance in themselves as living beings. The difference between these two artists is that one attempts to make an impact on a global scale, the other on a personal level. Mary Mattingly means to make society see our future and the drastic measures we might have to take to preserve life on Earth if our economy keeps declining at the rate that it is in the present. She takes the resources we grow naturally, recycles them, and creates sustainable life without doing any damage to the planet. On the other hand H. Dewey-Harborg takes the little things we create naturally as beings, such as a piece of hair, and makes art out of it. To her, that artwork isn’t just a piece of hair; it is proof of DNA that someone left behind. We ourselves, as humans, have the power to create and inspire because we ourselves are works of art. Both of these women stand against the path of disaster our society and economy is on. And both seem to say, through their art, that something needs to be done.