Photograph Magazine reviews Treasure Rooms

Mauro Fiorese: Treasure Rooms at Robert Mann Gallery
By Jordan G. Teicher | Photograph Magazine

It’s perhaps inevitable that the museum, that carefully curated and guarded space for seeing and exploring, would become a favorite subject of examination in its own right.

But in several recent works, photographers who have turned their attention to museums have highlighted not what’s immediately viewable, but what’s just out of sight. In his series Skeletons in the Closet, 2014, Klaus Pichler photographed the uncanny scenes found in off-limits corridors and workshops at Vienna’s Museum of Natural History. As part of his series Animal Logic, 2010, Richard Barnes often photographed natural history exhibits as they were being assembled. Alec Soth, meanwhile, focused on guards, those largely unseen but vital guardians of culture, in front of their favorite pieces at the Minneapolis Institute of Art for the museum’s anthology, The Art of Wonder, 2014.

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Financial Times features Fiorese

Snapshot: ‘Treasure Rooms’ (2014) by Mauro Fiorese
The photographs give the viewer a glimpse into the secret vaults of Italy’s greatest museums
September 2, 2016 | Laura Garmeson

Veronese photographer Mauro Fiorese’s Treasure Rooms series give the viewer a glimpse into the secret vaults of Italy’s greatest museums.

His photographs — printed on cotton paper beneath glass on wooden frames — depict lush masterpieces stored in sterile, regulated worlds that form a kind of ordered beauty. In his image above, “Treasure Rooms of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome”, the white tiles and gilt frames of the archives resemble a waiting room with Renaissance perspectives.

Fiorese, set for his first US show in New York, sees Treasure Rooms as a “series of non-traditional landscapes that form an imaginary art gallery”.
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Art in America features Mattingly 'Swale'

Movable Feast: Mary Mattingly's Floating Garden
Michael McCanne | Aug 12, 2016

When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2013, it flooded downtown Manhattan, parts of Queens, and Staten Island. An electrical substation exploded, cutting power to Lower Manhattan, and shipments of gas from New Jersey ground to a halt. Gas stations without electricity couldn’t pump; those that could soon ran out, causing huge lines and fuel shortages. In the span of a day, a hurricane revealed the precariousness of urban infrastructure in one of the richest cities in the country.
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PDN Features Back at the Water's Edge

A Sly Look at the Pleasures of Summer
PDN Photo of the Day | August 12, 2016

The end of summer is beginning to come into view, but there’s still time for a few more days at beach, and there is one more week for “Back at the Waterʼs Edge,” a group summer show at Robert Mann Gallery in New York City on view until August 19, which collects images of water, sand and beach culture from a range of photographers including Julie Blackmon, Jeff Brouws, Harry Callahan, Joe Deal, Elijah Gowin, Cig Harvey, Michael Kenna and Henry Wessel, among others. Callahan’s view of Cape Cod frames an empty beach and lonely volleyball net, and Kenna pictures dark arrangements of beach chairs under cloudy skies, but others are sunnier and less literal. In some, like Blackmon’s sunbathers on concrete, the kiddie pool in the background is an afterthought. In others, like Deal’s studies of the California coast, the beach is compressed into a slim strip by the ocean on one side and ocean-front real estate on the other. And while Cig Harvey makes a splash in one of her self-portraits, in the other, the sea is only a tiny sliver of horizon framing a vast blue sky.

Mattingly's 'Swale' Featured in The Wall Street Journal

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An Artist Floats an Edible Forest
Susan Delson | July 28, 2016

It didn’t take long for the fishermen in the Bronx’s Concrete Plant Park to notice “Swale.”

Under any circumstances, an 11-foot-high, 130-by-40-foot barge would be hard to miss. But one that calls itself “a floating food forest in New York City and beyond” almost demands a closer look.

Conceived by artist Mary Mattingly and brought into existence with a swarm of collaborators, “Swale” explores ideas about art, sustainability, technology and access to fresh, healthy food.

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Blouin Art Info Features Mary Mattingly

A Look at Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden Project, ‘Swale’
Taylor Dafoe | July 22, 2016

Part artwork, part communal resource, “Swale” is a 130-by-40-foot barge containing a forest garden of edible and medicinal plants, including blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, dandelions, stinging nettle, comfrey, chamomile, and much more. Hydration is supplied by filtered rainwater and New York rivers water. Visitors are welcome to come and pick items for free, but people are also encouraged to bring food items of their own, creating a fully sustainable ecosystem.

In a way, “Swale” was born out of a loophole. It’s illegal to grow public food in public spaces in New York City. So Mattingly moved her project to the water. “There’s so many great things about working on the water,” she said. “Skirting around those land laws is one of them.”

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Mary Mattingly featured in New York Times Style Magazine

Inside a Floating, Eco-Conscious Art Project
Wendy Vogel | June 14, 2016

Mattingly, 37, follows the tradition of environmental artists who devise alternative ways of living in the face of impending ecological disaster: she seeks to explore “what you can do on the water that you can’t do on land,” she says, and considers the sea an extension of the commons. In a 2009 work, the “Waterpod” project, Mattingly and four others lived on a self-sustaining barge that navigated New York’s waterways, kitted out with solar energy, edible plants, a water filtration system and chicken coop. Mattingly initially conceived “WetLand” — a repurposed 1971 Rockwell Whitcraft houseboat — for the Philadelphia nonprofit FringeArts in 2014. Collaborating with over 30 organizations, Mattingly gutted the 45-by-12-foot vessel, outfitting it with solar panels and varied species of wood stripped from a gym floor in Iowa. She describes the dramatically sloping boat as “something between sinking and rising, a shack and a palace.” It symbolically evokes the housing market crash, and is literally reminiscent of collapsing homes.

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