Light Work presents “Asea,” an exhibition of new work by Nicholas Muellner. The exhibition begins Tuesday, September 3, and runs through Friday, December 13. An opening reception will be held Thursday, September 19, from 5-7 p.m. at the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery.
Nicholas Mueller, “Untitled, Marseille”, 2022. Courtesy of the artist
In this exhibition, Muellner presents photographs depicting people performing pantomime in a verdant landscape made more complex by surreal lighting. These images are paired with a copy of Contact Sheet, which serves as a guide to the exhibition. The text in Contact Sheet is wryly poetic and succinct, loosely guiding us from image to image. “Asea” takes us somewhere without specifying the destination, creating a tone and mood that guides our desire for meaning but refuses to locate it precisely.
The exhibition conveys a kind of suspended drama through an installation that divides the gallery into two rooms, creating an atmosphere in which viewers are suspended in both space and time. Most of the portraits are of people connected to the maritime economy, and all of the photographs were taken in a landscape or setting where the subjects live: Marseille, Odessa, Milan, Long Beach. The subjects gesture towards the camera, holding the invisible tools of their respective professions, suggesting an alienation from their concrete identities.
With Asea, Muellner projects a state of suspension and a search for personal meaning within the inevitable narrative limits of photography. We are invited to think alone, in a subjective state that is not fixed, but rather floats within the parameters established by the photographs and text. Ultimately, we engage with Asea because it is simultaneously thoughtful, beautiful, and curious.
Biography of the artist
Muellner is an artist and writer whose books include Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, The Amnesia Pavilions, and In Most Tides an Island, which was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award and named Best Book of the Year at Artforum. In addition to solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, his writings have been published by MACK/SPBH, Aperture, Radius, Triple Canopy, Foam, and Routledge, among others. Muellner has given slide lectures internationally, including at MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum, the Photographers’ Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been supported by a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a John Gutmann Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies. Muellner received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MFA from Temple University. He is the founding director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Cornell University.
