Sarah J. Mueller: “Reconstructions”
- Eye Level
- Mar 14
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 15
Every canvas in this show says: stop a second. There’s more here than you think there is.
A first encounter with a Sarah J. Mueller painting can be confusing. What is this wild play of color?; what are those smeared fields of pigment; why do things appear to be both static and in motion?; most of all, what the heck am I looking at? For a few breathless seconds, those questions agitate the air. They interpose themselves between you and the piece. Then, all at once, the interrogatory veil falls away. In an instant, the painting coalesces. You know what you’re looking at. You’re looking at people.
But who are these people, and what are they up to? It’s hard to tell, but it feels important to know. The indeterminacy that had just been dispelled comes roaring back — at a different angle, but just as ferociously as before. The posture of Mueller’s characters seems significant, and their washed-out faces conceal secrets. Even when the painter has blurred their features, their bearing radiates disquiet. A few anxious clock-ticks pass before an interpretation arrives. Having internalized the narrative, the blurry snapshot of an emotional scene, a shifting image in acrylic, you move on to the next one, and the whole thing happens again.
Such is the staggered rhythm of viewing “Reconstructions,” a highly unusual exhibition that hangs in the gallery at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.) until the end of the month. It is a show that doesn’t let the visitor proceed casually. Instead the exhibition sets its own peculiar tempo — one commensurate with the pace of revelation. Each painting draws the viewer into a volley: first, she must orient herself in the scene, which takes time, and then she must determine to her own satisfaction what is going on. That takes time, too.
Some abstract work passively allows the viewer to impose herself on the canvases too easily. Some realist art gives away the goods too quickly. Mueller rejects both approaches, and compels us to jump the twisting rope to her own count. Hers are dreamlike stories in which the dreamer is fiercely present. We penetrate this turbulent consciousness at our own risk.
Curator Andrea McKenna is no stranger to restless art. She’s showed Mark Kurdziel, Andrea Epstein and Jen Morris to Jersey City; she knows about the mysterious, non-linear storytelling power of paint on canvas. Yet “Reconstructions” is as far into the hypnagogic realm as she’s ever taken this gallery.
In more than twenty paintings — some as big as an altarpiece, and some as small as a sheet of notebook paper — Mueller gives us smeared hallucinations with social dimensions, smoldering desire, and flashes of insight into human behavior. None of her figures ever exactly crystallizes. They surface partially, emerging from the murk and haze with contours, posture, and moods intact.
Sometimes her subjects seem to be melting into the numinous atmosphere around them. In “Camp,” what may be a pair of spectral beings sit side by side with sticks that might be fishing poles. All that’s clearly discernible is a pair of shoes. This isn’t a representation of daylight, or twilight, or even moonlight. It’s a fading afterimage: the residue of activity, a remembrance of something that may be slipping from the artist’s mind.
That indeterminate inner state returns in “Buds,” a large work in acrylic where the characters are as wiped out as they’d be if they the stars of a photograph left on the dashboard of an old car. A pair of people, buddies perhaps, sit side by side, faces pale blue, eyes and noses only barely visible in the wash of color, legs crossed and shoulders a little slumped, partially translucent and implicitly defiant. From the broad and fevered brushstrokes that halo their heads and seem to carry a silent transmission into the air around them, we know that they’re doing some heavy thinking. We can guess the two are close, because it’s tough to tell where one body ends and the next begins. Whether it’s a healthy one is tougher to tell. The relationship may be bent, struggling, tentatively flowering, like the budding flowers on a table nearby.
The fragile ego boundaries that “Buds” hints at are, in “All at Once,” unmistakable. Here, the main figure in the yellowed foreground closes her eyes and leans toward the viewer as if she’s walking into a stiff wind. The savage crack in her left cheek and the streak of red-brown paint beneath her crumpled nose imply that she’s taking damage and may be coming apart. Behind her — though still attached to her — three ghostly figures drift in different directions. In an infinite regress of personal fragmentation, there may even be figures nested within those figures.
Like many of Mueller’s characters, the woman in “All at Once” barely has a mouth: the painter hasn’t given her a blank space above her chin as much as she’s hinted at a sealed opening with blended-color strokes that look like erasure marks. She can feel, but she can’t speak. Her emotions are volcanic, but her expression is stifled.
Then there are the mouths that merely seem like they’re occluded. The full lips of “The Visitor” are a slightly deeper indigo (for Mueller, skin is frequently blue, and the forces working on that skin is often a miasmal yellow) than the rest of his shrouded face. They aren’t immediately visible, but like everything else in a Sarah Mueller painting, they appear at the speed of revelation. Once you notice them, they’re impossible to unsee. Other apertures and breaks in the figure’s seated body soon surface from the streaks of paint, too. We can’t read his eyes, but the rectangular shape of his head and the hard right angle with high it meets his shoulder, his dangling fingers, and the total transparency of his legs tell us plenty. He’s silent now, but he’s got something to say — and he’s not going anywhere.
Some of the most psychologically complex pieces in “Reconstructions” are the smallest. “Bathing” is a tricky little study of two female figures partially submerged in a swimming pool. Their faces are blurred, and their bodies nearly melt into the swirls of paint around them, but it appears they might be looking at each other. One angles back toward the upper corner, rests on an arm and shows off a torso in a single-piece bathing suit, and angles her long legs toward the other. Her friend, meanwhile, takes a defensive posture, tucking her knees up against her breasts and sitting on her hands.
It’s an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. But since it’s happening amidst the wash of water, it’s possible to guess how this scene is going to go. Here and elsewhere, Mueller shows how she can capture mute desire in a few fluid strokes — the way a body leans, the swing of an earring, the close-cropped hair on the back of a woman’s neck.
It all comes to a head on the terrific “Catch a Ride,” a work of pure Hudson County impressionism that captures the fear, indeterminacy, and sexual excitement of a night out in the city. A woman in a low cut red dress steps away from a crowded curb and into the middle of a street. She appears to be following another girl, but she’s lost in thought, and she’s clutching her left arm with her right, just above the elbow, like she’s trying to hold herself together. We see her in the headlights of an oncoming car: we don’t know how fast its moving, but Mueller’s wide and sweeping ochre-yellow brushstrokes suggest that it’s covering some ground.
Just as we can’t make out the mouths of many of Mueller’s characters, we aren’t shown the vehicle’s grill or anything below its high beams. Its trap is shut, too. The blue-skinned central character is having an inward experience out in public, under automotive spotlights, stepping toward an unknown destination with her long hair slung over her bare shoulder, but wary of her surroundings.
Did Mueller once see something like this? Did it cause her to slow down, as she asks us to slow down, and, before rendering judgment or moving on to the next sensation, wait a beat for recognition to arrive? Did the colors of a fast-moving world coalesce into a human tableau? Did she let what she’d experience tell her a story about power and precarity, satisfaction and hunger, and our tenuous relationships to others and ourselves?
I’d wager she did. I’d bet she had to get these fleeting revelations down on a canvas before they dissipated. Frame by frame, she’s registered a world in transition. Better yet, she’s used her acrylic and her brushes to explore the tempo of discovery. She asks us for the same thing she shares with us: a few critical moments.
(The Art House Productions Gallery is open from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. on the weekends. This Sunday, March 16 at 2 p.m., Sarah Mueller will talk about her work.)
