Ever since the Forest City Ratner deal went through to build the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, Mary Mattingly’s apartment hallway on Eastern Parkway has been the width of a backyard creek. At least 40 boxes are piled up and crammed together with artwork salvaged from the art studio that she had to abandon to the ripple effects of the 8 million square feet, $4 billion real estate development.
Mattingly is an artist whose work includes “Seven Firm Oligopoly,” a photo-collaged image of a future world in which economic and political power has been concentrated in the hands of seven corporations whose headquarters must be traversed like islands (the firms “go something like: Nestle, Disney, Bechtel, World Bank, Wal-Mart, ‘HaliMartin,’ BRIC,” she explains on her website), and “The Forest,” a panorama of a woods of cell phone towers disguised as trees. That this development would affect her is perhaps less ironic than expected.
The building that housed her studio was actually purchased by the Department of Education on November 1, 2006, “at the very last minute,” she claims, because the DOE sought a space with proximity to the Ratner development. The five other artists on her floor and 15 on the floor below hers (including two who also lived there) had only a month to move after the DOE said they would only purchase the building if they could start gutting right away. This was on December 1, 2006, and Mattingly reports that to date, only one of the artists on her floor has found a new studio space to rent. They were “spoiled” by the price of the space and the proximity to their living spaces, she explains. But she doesn’t plan to leave New York for New Jersey where the building’s previous owners, a moving company, are planning to buy another building.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” she says, referring to Ratner, when I visit her in her cramped living space to discuss her latest work, “Going to town meetings won’t do anything.” That’s a far cry from what it was like in Somers, CT, the town that, while she was growing up, had a population of 7,000.
However, in a subsequent conversation, Mattingly corrects her own pessimism. It’s not that nothing can be done, she admits; it’s just so frustrating and “it doesn’t feel like there is much time to be frustrated when there are so many worse things going on in the world.” And besides, she’s become perversely interested in seeing the result. The development’s “going to be gross, but there’s something appealing about that grossness.”
Mattingly is a petite, mousy woman with wispy black hair and big eyes who’s surprisingly cheerful for someone who spends her days imagining apocalyptic scenarios and human inventions to respond to them. One of those inventions, her “Wearable Home”, was showcased in Ecotopia, last year’s exhibition of environmentally-concerned photographers at the International Center of Photography. The “Wearable Home” is a khaki-colored outfit that makes appearances in many of her photographs, though on the day I visited her apartment/studio, it was hanging—lifeless as a snakeskin—on the bedroom doorknob. The eerie suit is reminiscent of a monk’s robe with a hood and numerous pockets, and is described on her website (www.marymattingly.com), with far greater attention to detail than it is made. The hood contains what Mattingly calls a “celcerform” to zap the cancer created from “yesterday’s cell phones,” while the body’s folds contain “a homemade island-builder” in case the wearer should decide “to make a home separate from others since, when the tides rise, the islands usually survive.” On her website, casual Internet browsers can also print out a “Wearable Home” of their own from life-size patterns.
All of the elements of the outfit allow the wearer to wander indefinitely and self-sufficiently through an environmentally and politically ravaged landscape. Up Flatbush Avenue, perhaps, weaving through the increased traffic from the new Nets stadium. And Mattingly does imagine her “Wearable Home” as having a real-life application:
“In the future, there will be 3-D printing, so villages will be able to print out clothing for every person, and the clothing can also be used as a home,” she explains, with a characteristic disregard for the line between those predictions based on plausibility and those based on her own imagination (a disregard that often forces me to ask sheepishly whether she is serious, which she regularly insists she is).
“It’s like the $100 laptop,” she says, self-mockingly referring to the recent scheme to provide every child in Africa with his own computer.
For a woman who spends so much of her time developing fantastical clothing, Mattingly dresses extremely conservatively. When I meet with her, she’s wearing black slacks and a nondescript dark shirt, with only a hint of personality popping through the collar in the form of a sheer, frilly top. Like her outfit, the “Wearable Home” will also have layers—the first for the Arctic, the second for the Tropics, the third for Water—each removable according to the conditions.
As she shows me the pattern for the outfit on her website, she lets some of her non-fantasy world practicality sneak in to her explanation. “Has anyone actually printed it out,” I ask?
“Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to put together,” she smiles with a slightgrimace.
Mattingly’s most ambitious new project is an installation she calls the “WaterPod.” The plan for it consists of three domes donated by Good Karma Domes, foam (leftover from the ICP exhibition) and a barge of recyclable bottles she hopes to get from a waste company in New Jersey. She plans to dock the WaterPod at West 23rd Street near Chelsea Piers where it will act as a living space, a studio and a lab for experiments (on water purification of the Hudson, for instance) for her and a friend. But it will also serve as a public space for “talks about new technology and podcasts.”
Mattingly wanted to bore a hole in the floor of the WaterPod so she could catch fish from the Hudson and live off of only that, but an engineer friend nixed the idea. “He said that every time there was a wave, the water would just slosh up into it. We’ll have to shop at the store instead,” she says, again, seemingly surprised and chagrined by the persistence of practical constraints.
Currently, she says she is largely supporting herself through her work. But she has worked—in typical NYC artist fashion—in many capacities: a digital technician for Fotocare (where she trained fashion photographers on how to use new techniques), a guard at the New Museum and as a registrar at a gallery. She also makes clothes, designs websites (her own is extremely elaborate for an artist) and gets funding from a couple sources, including Art Omi, a sculpture park in Ghent, NY.
Home Is Where the Art Is
With all the attention to homes, I ask her where the obsession comes from. She shrugs and offers an innocent story. She lived next to a waterfall in Connecticut as a child and her basement would always get flooded. The family would have to pitch in and “bucket it out,” she says. “That explains the obsession with water.”
But it takes her a little more time warming up before she’ll share more. Finally, after two hours of chatting, we hit a gusher when she admits that her father, a devout Roman Catholic who’s always hosting an international Catholic in need of shelter (like “priests from Nigeria amazed by the Home Depot”), has transformed her childhood home into a bunker—complete with a generator and “tons of food.”
“He probably understands more than I do that we won’t live through a nuclear or chemical weapons attack, but he does think he can do something about getting cut off from the grid and being self-sustainable,” she says. “He considered getting a modest amount of milk- and egg-producing animals,” for the bunker, but probably won’t be allowed to because of town zoning.
“Now they’re trying to construct a route for me to get there from New York,” she continues, referring to her family. When I ask her again the question that’s quickly becoming a refrain, the question as to whether she’s being serious, she laughs and says she is, “It’s funny, but it’s not funny. ‘Mar,’ he says, ‘if you can’t make it, at least the rest of the town will be safe.’”
It turns out that her father, a graphic designer, has also become obsessed by Saint Faustina, a Polish nun and missionary who sheltered people from the Nazis during World War II. In her diaries, Saint Faustina wrote of seeing Jesus Christ who, in a vision, told her to hire an artist to paint his image. If the image was depicted and seen by others, Jesus told the nun, people would be saved from burning in hell. Inspired by this story, her father is writing a screenplay about Saint Faustina and has turned all of his graphic design talent over to a business devoted to making posters of Jesus in the style of the nun’s artist. He then sells them to churches.
“He wanted to give them away but, instead, he’s sold them and made a profit, actually,” Mattingly explains, seeming to bear some of her father’s Catholic guilt for this confession. “He’s also written a book about his own life.” She admits that maybe he’s influenced her more than she lets on. “He was the child of two alcoholics and, at one point, ran away and lived in a tent on the roof of a YMCA where he was a cook by day. He supported his family with the money.”
She shows me his memoir for sale online at www.mercyimages.com and adds, “He’s also lived in a wigwam in the back of a graveyard. He used an old tire to make a fire in the winter.”
Until the WaterPod is built, Mattingly is looking to improve upon her more ho-hum form of shelter. Her Prospect Heights apartment has become too cramped since she had to move her studio into the hallway, and she’s just found an apartment in the Bushwick area three times as big. It could double as a studio, she says. And who knows, maybe, a bunker as well.
