Leaning into materials of refuse—security envelopes, sirens, seashells, blue ink, and a housefly—Block-to-Block examines the illusion of security that holds together our fragile domestic existence. Structure emerges through economy, scale, and proportion, though all are destined to collapse.

At the center of the exhibition are Open Houses, several suspended assemblages of homes constructed from security envelopes that once contained medical, utility, and child-support bills. Flayed open, their interiors expose the once-concealed security patterns. The only openings are the envelope windows which trace back to an early 20th-century invention that catalyzed the rise of patterned linings meant to obscure sensitive information sealed within paper walls.

On a nearby wall, paper formats A1 through A7 nestle together in blue ink, flush and sequential, like a family of rectangles or the first pages of a good book: your story, my story, our story. Beside them is an A5 Risograph book, its pages saturated in the color blue. The soy-based ink sits on the surface of the paper, making it non-colorfast—vulnerable to touch, smudging, and the trace of our fingerprints. From Lapis Lazuli to denim, blue has long carried symbolic and economic weight in stone, symbol, and commodity. From police to politicians, royalty to blue-collar workers, its shifting meanings mirror our own and even dominates the color schemes of social media.

Idioms—so ingrained in the American lexicon—often falter in translation for non-native speakers, disrupting the comfort of communication. Shuffling familiar sayings into new linguistic landscapes: don’t cry over spilled ink, the sky is bluer on the other side, and the dishwasher is half-full, lean into attitudes surrounding losing, yearning, and having. The materials that accompany them—white-out and sandpaper—are short-lived, each operating through reduction: sandpaper erodes through wear, while white-out conceals through layering. Both negotiate presence and absence in language and form.

The exhibition concludes with Musca domestica Linnaeus—the common housefly—enshrined within a seashell like a black pearl. On its pedestal the fly becomes a witness, a martyr to love, violence, joy, and grief. The fly on the wall is the bearer of wisdom, often silenced lest our private truths be presented to the public sphere. Making space for the ephemeral, Block-to-Block reshapes our domestic fragility into an elegy for endurance in the face of trauma and loss.

A special thanks to the Lithuanian Council for Culture for their generous support for this exhibition, Meno Parkas (Kaunas, LT), High Noon Gallery (New York, NY), and the Rathaus (Kockertürn, Germany) where Daina Mattis was an artist in residence in 2024 and received support needed to conceive and make several of the works for Block-to-Block.   

Author of the text – Daina Mattis

Daina Mattis (b. 1984) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores perception, nature, grief, and technology through vehicles of imitation, scale, craft, and time. Mattis is the youngest of four children of Lithuanian immigrants. Her experiences in a bilingual, culturally rich home in Los Angeles greatly influence her work and how she explores visual language.

Mattis was a Cooper Union A.I.R. (2016) and shows extensively. Exhibitions include: Forever Wild, High Noon Gallery, New York (solo) 2023; Wake, High Noon Gallery, New York (solo) 2023; Family Style, High Noon Gallery, New York (solo); Bona Fide, AMAG at St. Thomas Aquinas College, New York (solo), 2019; The Cooper Union A.I.R. Exhibition, New York, 2016; Art in Miami, Context, J. Cacciola Gallery, 2012; and Daina Mattis, Frances Keevil Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2010. Mattis has been featured in WHITEHOT, Design Milk, ARTnews, Art Frankly, Two Coats of Paint, and Professional Artist Magazine. Mattis was a co-founder and co-director at Undercurrent in DUMBO, NY. She is represented by High Noon Gallery, New York, NY. She is a Part-time Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design, at The New School in New York, NY.

She is preparing for a group show at,  Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (MBAL), Switzerland and a solo show at High Noon Gallery in New York in 2026.