Thursday, January 19, 2006

FUTURE IMPERFECT
MARY MATTINGLY

Mary Mattingly’s digitally manipulated photographs are on display in Second Nature. Their subject matter is the “distant future of the human race.” In her imagined future, industrial civilization has fallen and people live as nomads, wearing their homes on their backs like snails. Forced to scavenge for scarce natural resources, the figures in this landscape are cut off from each other. Ms. Mattingly creates these scenes by first sewing costumes, designing machinery, and posing the characters in each scene. The resulting photographs are tweaked digitally to create the final products on display.