Mary Mattingly was born in 1978 in Connecticut , in the United States. She combines traditional photography with subtle computer enhancement to create backdrops for her unfolding narrative. She looks at the distant future of the human race where after the fall of post-industrial civilization, nomads wear their homes on their backs like snails, using patched-together machines to gather resources from the ravaged environment. Forced to be self-sufficient, this new breed of human is detached from its fellow wanderers, isolated in austere but beautiful landscapes, preoccupied with the need for survival... "I think about technology", Mary Mattingly says, "The constant mediator between you and me... As technology expands exponentially, we will reach a point where we exist as wanderers in our own worlds, participants in simulated communities." Her figures littering this future vision world are stripped of every possession and concept but those they can carry with them through the desolated landscapes every now and then disturbed by an abandoned oil rig, a rusty dustbin on the beach, an unlikely supermarket on what is now, after the great flood, a far away island - relics of a technological age that has long gone, finally overwhelmed by its own impact. The images - digitally created composite photographs - are replete with gaudy sunsets, with water in all shades of blue imaginable and spectacular cloud scenes that do not entirely disguise their artifice. In constructing her images, she builds sculptures out of ragged bits of fabric, wire, wood, and metal, then situates them so as to suggest jerry-rigged communication devices in a world that has devolved into a post-high-tech Dark Age. Mary Mattingly lives and works in New York.
