Light Work presents “Asea,” an exhibition of new works by Nicholas Muellner. The exhibition opens Tuesday, Sept. 3, and will run through Friday, Dec. 13. An opening reception will take place in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery on Thursday, Sept. 19, from 5-7 p.m.
Nicholas Mueller, “Untitled, Marseille,” 2022. Courtesy of the artist
In this exhibition, Muellner offers up photographs depicting people pantomiming in a verdant landscape made complex with surreal lighting; these images are paired with an issue of Contact Sheet that serves as a guidebook to the exhibition. The text in Contact Sheet is wryly poetic and succinct, and loosely leads us from picture to picture. “Asea” takes us somewhere without making its destination specific, setting a tone and mood that guides our desire for meaning but refuses to precisely locate it.
The exhibition conveys a type of suspended drama via an installation that divides the gallery into two rooms, creating an atmosphere in which viewers float, both in space and time. The majority of the portraits are of people connected to the maritime economy and all of the photographs were made in a landscape or setting that the subjects live in: Marseille, Odesa, Milan, Long Beach. The subjects gesture toward the camera, holding the invisible tools of their respective trades, and suggesting an estrangement from their concrete identities.
With “Asea,” Muellner projects a state of limbo and a search for personal meaning within photography’s inevitable narrative limits. We are asked to ponder alone, in a subjective state that is not fixed but which hovers within the parameters established by the photographs and text. Ultimately, we engage with “Asea” because it is at once thoughtful, beautiful and curious.
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 shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award and named a Best Book of the Year in Artforum. In addition to solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, his writing has been published by MACK/SPBH, Aperture, Radius, Triple Canopy, Foam, and Routledge, among others. Muellner has performed slide lectures internationally, including at MoMA PS1, 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 B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University and an M.F.A. from Temple University. He is the founding co-director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Cornell University.
