In this exhibition, Nicholas 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.

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Nicholas 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 BA in comparative literature from Yale University and an MFA from Temple University. He is the founding co-director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Cornell University.

nicholasmuellner.com

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.com

Light Work lightwork.org

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According to the Laws of Chance: Group Exhibition

May 31–August 16, 2024

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Reception: Friday, July 26, 5-7pm

According to the Laws of Chance is a subtitle included in many works by the Dadaist painter Jean Arp that describes his systematic yet chance-driven method of creating his simple and playful paintings. Arp would let torn pieces of paper fall to the floor to determine his painting or collage compositions. Although the outcomes are different, Arp’s ethos can be found in the work of the photographers selected for this group exhibition.

The artists in this exhibition—Cheryl Miller, Claire A. Warden, Jaclyn Wright, Josh Thorson, Kyle Tata, Louis Chavez, and Will Stith, and Light Work’s collection artists, Cecil McDonald, Jr., James Welling, Peter Finnemore, and Rita Hammond—are using and defining chance as a core element of their largely divergent practices.

Chance is a core tenet of photography. The image-makers in this exhibition embrace the unpredictable and find ways to amplify chance for conceptual and creative purposes. These artists interpret chance via darkroom and analog experimentation, conceptually driven exploration, daily image-making, and studio-based arranging. The results of these methods are surprising expressions of each artist’s voice. Together they showcase the wide-ranging use of chance and highlight it as a vital tool in contemporary photographic practice.

Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

daylightblue.com

Light Work

lightwork.org

Cover Image by Jaclyn Wright

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In 1987, Sophia Chai immigrated to New York City from South Korea as a teenager without knowing English. Looking back, she has described that experience as feeling untethered to any internal compass that she could use to navigate her place in a new country with a new language. She visually explains these experiences to us by reinterpreting the Korean language’s characters in photographs that enable us to see the contradictions of visual and verbal communication.

Chai uses optics (focal length, perspective, perception, and magnification) to pin down the marks, rubbings, and paintings on her studio walls. The overall effect is a collage of ideas, with an efficient yet complicated economy of picture making with intentional gaps. These gaps can describe the moment right before the sound of a word comes out of the interior space of the mouth.

sophiachai.com

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.com

Light Work lightwork.org

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