Mattingly makes the case that poetry is precisely what’s missing from mainstream responses to anthropogenic climate change.
Robert Mann Gallery
Transformative Touch: Photographs Laced with Thread
New York’s art world seems to be experiencing a newfound love affair with art made by hand — art that has, dare I say, “craft” in it.
A Bag Lady by Any Other Name
There are many dystopian futures out there. Mary Mattingly’s, recently on view at Robert Mann Gallery, is oddly disjunctive, containing the requisite pessimism imbued with occasional broad strokes of optimism.
A Miniature Kingdom of Infinite Space
In art, control is an elemental if underappreciated principle. At a basic level, art entails control; control over material, control over process, a lack of control over chance. Amid the chaos of life, what do you seek to selectively remove and stage? Richard Avedon viewed it as art’s defining element, reflecting, “I think all art is about control — the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.”
Staging Childhood Through a Nostalgic Lens
No holiday season is complete without a viewing of Home Alone, the classic film in which a young Macaulay Culkin is left to watch mob flicks by himself while his family heads to Paris for Christmas. Though few of us can boast of having fended off a couple of crooks from the family mansion, we all cherish our own childhood memories of times when distracted parents or inattentive babysitters allowed us to act on our imaginative impulses. Day Tripping, photographer Julie Blackmon’s stunning new show at the Robert Mann Gallery, captures the mischief and magic that brew when adult backs are momentarily turned.