Hanna Mattes: Searching For the Cold Spot

About

Through analogue photographs, Hanna Mattes captures meteorite craters and the impacting cosmic rocks themselves. She traveled across the US and to the Canary Islands in search of craters made by hypervelocity meteorites billions of years ago, photographing these deep and wide crevices in situ. Simultaneously, she scoured the mineral hoards of international Natural History Museums known for their collections of
interplanetary impacting rocks: ores, opals and quartz crystals. After photographing the specimens in their displays, Mattes manipulated the negatives altering them by using watercolours thereby talking of the mysteries of the fantastical relics without bereaving them of their secretive undefined aura. Mattes impacts the rocks themselves directly by layering and painting on each selected negative thus creating a reversed process-coloured photographic image. In the monograph and the exhibition her “hand impacted” work of meteorites is juxtaposed with her found impacted landscapes. Through these pairings, Mattes has developed a particular visual interpretation that operates outside the realms of both the documentary and the esoteric. Searching for the Cold Spot attempts
to stimulate a metaphysical contemplation of the dual nature of the meteorite and its impact, between its life-giving and destructive forces. 

“ Back to the collision: they happen all the time, you get a nudge, lose chunks, but you pretty much stay on course. I never know if I hit them or they hit me. Star-crossed orbits. (…) Existential collisions. (…) And that’s when it gets coldest, when you’re moving slowly and everything compresses. It’s some high-density shit, these cold spots and once you’re in, there are few ways out.” — David Colosi (excerpt)

The launch of Searching for the Cold Spot with a text by David Colosi will coincide with the opening night of the show.