Two children, a girl in a polka dot dress with a green plastic basket full of fish and a boy carrying a laden red bucket wade through ankle deep murky water along a neighborhood street. A basketball hoop hangs from a plywood backboard overhead. It is high tide in Kabasalan, Philippines. Giacomo d’Orlando’s photograph captures these children’s reality.{/span}
In front of a photograph of an abandoned phosphate mine lies an array of pebbles, ceramic vessels, a desiccated fish, as oranges seem to float between them. The objects in Mary Mattingly’s print “Holding not Having (After Robin Messing)” all connect to the phosphate, laid down by water in sediments eons ago, now extracted from the earth for human benefit. Mattingly’s title refers to Messing’s powerful poem cycle of loss and healing.
Water is central to two solo exhibitions at The Current in Stowe this winter. “Symbiosis” features large scale photographs in coastal communities across Southeast Asia and Australia by Italian documentary photographer Giacomo d’Orlando. In “Water Writes the Garden,” with photographs, sculptures and poetry, New York based artist Mary Mattingly considers water’s role as a timekeeper, storyteller, and living archive.
Both exhibitions are curated by Rachel Moore, executive director of The Current.
“At The Current, we are committed to showcasing artwork that sparks urgent conversations about the defining issues of our time,” said Moore.
“With ‘Symbiosis,” d’Orlando offers a visual call to action, inviting the public to reflect on our shared responsibility and the urgent need to restore balance between human activity and marine health.”
Mattingly’s work, Moore noted, “transforms how we see and think about the systems that sustain life. With ‘Water Writes the Garden’ she invites us to slow down and consider water not just as a resource, but as a storyteller, one that records histories and writes futures into the land itself.”
The 13 large-scale (37.5-inch by 25.5-inch) photographs in “Symbiosis” belong to d’Orlando’s long term project launched in 2022 considering how climate change is reshaping ecosystems and communities who depend on them and responses to those changes.
His sensitive and beautiful images from Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines document changes occurring and people living with these changes as fisheries and livelihoods are imperiled and high water floods homes and streets.
The gallery guide with extended labels for “Symbiosis” offers additional details about people and places in d’Orlando’s photographs.
Abdul, a 62-year-old man in Demak Regency, Indonesia, sits in his living room, a handsome cabinet behind him, an upbeat program visible on his Toshiba television. A little boy stands next in the doorway next to an electric fan. The floor of their living room is awash in three or four inches of water — over their feet, the fan base and more.
D’Orlando’s text explains that Abdul, a fisherman, has already raised his house twice — in 2009 and 2019, but does not have the funds for another lift. Not only are the family’s lives impacted by living in the water, but increasingly harsh weather and fewer fish endanger their traditional livelihood.
An image from Guiuan, Philippines, at first glance looks like a grid-like array of dots, punctuated with a few spots of color. In this aerial photograph, women tend transplanted mangrove saplings — tiny trees-to-be that they planted here in the water to restore mangrove barriers that stabilize soil and provide a nature-based defense against typhoons. Concentric ripples in the water radiate around the women as they do this hopeful work.
Interdisciplinary artist Mattingly is well known for her large-scale public sculpture installations. Her “Swale,” a floating food forest, is on a barge moored in in New York City. Her massive tidal water clock, “Ebb of a Spring Tide,” with scaffolding and edible vegetation mirrored the New York skyline as East River water pulsed through it.
“Water Writes the Garden,” the title piece for the exhibition, stands in the middle of the Main Gallery. With its selection of ceramic vessels on different level, it reaches nearly six feet tall. Water flows through them, via plastic tubing.
The water runs perpetually, Mattingly notes in her text, “in a cycle like an hourglass suggesting the built environment is all a type of ‘garden’ where I’m imagining the water contains all of its histories and present interactions, stories, etc.”
The work of water over geologic time and our current consumption of the resources it created are among Mattingly’s themes. Throughout her images are layered inquiries into interconnections between our ecosystems, environment and ourselves.
In “A Silence Contained for Years,” tubes and lines run over and through her flat file cabinet, which stands before a photograph of heaps of mined material. On the cabinet’s top is a rock collection of sorts — minerals and chemical elements in raw form that go into making a camera, a tool central to Mattingly’s work.
In “Between Bears Ears and Daneros Mine” we see the Utah natural landform, a place of extraordinary natural diversity of exceptional importance to Native American people. Bears Ears was designated a national monument by President Obama, a designation repealed by President Trump in his first term and then restored by President Biden. Legal battles are ongoing over the expansion of the Daneros mine, an idled uranium mine on public land by Bears Ears.
In Mattingly’s image we see the landmark against a blue sky with small piles of extracted material, spent shell casings, tactical vehicle parts referencing military and industrial infrastructure.
A framed sign obscures most of the view and repeats the Samuel Beckett line, “It’s because there is nothing. Or it’s because I have no eyes.” Mattingly’s choice of that line relates to the view, with the federal opening of that land to mining, that there is nothing else there.
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