Press
Press Release: March 2009
*Johanna Mueller
Creature Alterations, Myth & Transformations
Painting & Prints
Exhibition: March 6 – April 10, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 6:30 – 9 PM*
Artist Talk: Storytelling and the Art of the Print: Saturday, March 21, 2 – 4PM
REYES + DAVIS is pleased to announce Johanna Mueller's Creature Alterations, Myth & Transformations, a new collection of engraved prints, artists books, and paintings. Johanna Mueller, an already accomplished printmaker and painter, is a MFA candidate at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Outside of the University setting, this is Ms. Mueller's first solo exhibition of her work in the DC area.
Johanna Mueller was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. A self-described tomboy, she had an almost venerational fascination with nature and animals. She wanted pets, but her parents resisted. So she began collecting all manner of animal figurines, stuffed animals, and other faunal curios. In lieu of many relationships with actual animals, she began to explore deep and fantastic relationships with these animal icons, which became totemic for her. Fetish objects.
Johanna began to do a lot of animal-themed artwork, eventually combining animal forms to create her own mythical creatures. She also began to develop her own mytho-poetic meanings for different animals and animal powers, and how those powers informed her own psyche.
When Johanna entered art school, she was encouraged to move on to other subject matter, but after taking up printmaking, a medium in which frequent literary and folk-tale subject matter gives permission for the exploration of animistic, mythic, and fairy tale themes, she knew she'd found a place to continue to explore her unique artistic vision.
Helen Frederick, Professor of Art and Visual Technology at GMU has said of the work in
Creature Alterations, Myth & Transformations: Her creatures give us an actualized account while presenting a powerful and amazing mystery. Mueller calls these images mythical, and in their beautifully carved elegant shapes they embrace a spectacle that is unique. Their patterns and designs, drawn from observation as well as historic reference become transcendent and reflective. In her prints and books we follow a
visual call of many various creatures repeated or introduced in different ways. We think about how and why they are transformed, for in them lay the conduit to our understanding. Are we on mortal or ancestral ground? Do these alterations cry out to each other, the proportionate world, or us? With their alterations come enormous enjoyment, discovery and through their intertwined representations our hearts are rewarded.
Writer and media critic Gareth Branwyn says of Ms. Mueller's work:
Myths, fairy tales, cave paintings, bestiaries, totems, medicine bags, fetish objects, curios, icons, storybooks, rituals, avatars, animal spirits. These are the nouns at work in Johanna Mueller's artistic lexicon. The verbs: engraving, printing, book making, sculpting, and painting. And the predicate that brings it all to life: embody.
Johanna Mueller has consciously chosen to work in a medium, printmaking that bears something of a stigma in the fine art world. She's also chosen to do work in miniature and artist books, two other humbled media. Just as she's willing to buck convention in pursuing the inspired subject of her work, she's also comfortable in the media that best give it form.
Recently, that's also encompassed painting, where she's become interested in playing with perceptual scale and the viewer's expectations. She has small-scale animal heads, sculpted from polymer clay and gold leaf, on wall plaques, letter pressed and hand-illuminated artists books, mid-size engraved prints, and large-size paintings, all depicting her various repeated creature motifs. “I want to play around with the microscopic and the macroscopic, the sense of scale in the room,” Mueller says. “I want to create something of a ritual space, to create the feeling of the symbolic spirits of my creations moving from one form into another. I think having these repeating forms taking on different shapes and sizes helps to convey that idea.”
Look closely at Ms. Mueller's work and another form of embodiment becomes readily apparent. Her own. “I see my art as itself a kind of idolic sacrifice. I sacrifice myself, my time, my body, my attention, to render these totemic representations.” She painstakingly carves her meaning, her intent, into these images in hopes that some of that intent might unwind on those who experience it. She says: “My own myth streams from the eyes and mouths of these animals, and yet they seek to accept the translation of the myth present in your life.”
*Johanna Mueller
Creature Alterations, Myth & Transformations
Painting & Prints
Exhibition: March 6 – April 10, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 6:30 – 9 PM*
Artist Talk: Storytelling and the Art of the Print: Saturday, March 21, 2 – 4PM
REYES + DAVIS is pleased to announce Johanna Mueller's Creature Alterations, Myth & Transformations, a new collection of engraved prints, artists books, and paintings. Johanna Mueller, an already accomplished printmaker and painter, is a MFA candidate at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Outside of the University setting, this is Ms. Mueller's first solo exhibition of her work in the DC area.
Johanna Mueller was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. A self-described tomboy, she had an almost venerational fascination with nature and animals. She wanted pets, but her parents resisted. So she began collecting all manner of animal figurines, stuffed animals, and other faunal curios. In lieu of many relationships with actual animals, she began to explore deep and fantastic relationships with these animal icons, which became totemic for her. Fetish objects.
Johanna began to do a lot of animal-themed artwork, eventually combining animal forms to create her own mythical creatures. She also began to develop her own mytho-poetic meanings for different animals and animal powers, and how those powers informed her own psyche.
When Johanna entered art school, she was encouraged to move on to other subject matter, but after taking up printmaking, a medium in which frequent literary and folk-tale subject matter gives permission for the exploration of animistic, mythic, and fairy tale themes, she knew she'd found a place to continue to explore her unique artistic vision.
Helen Frederick, Professor of Art and Visual Technology at GMU has said of the work in
Creature Alterations, Myth & Transformations: Her creatures give us an actualized account while presenting a powerful and amazing mystery. Mueller calls these images mythical, and in their beautifully carved elegant shapes they embrace a spectacle that is unique. Their patterns and designs, drawn from observation as well as historic reference become transcendent and reflective. In her prints and books we follow a
visual call of many various creatures repeated or introduced in different ways. We think about how and why they are transformed, for in them lay the conduit to our understanding. Are we on mortal or ancestral ground? Do these alterations cry out to each other, the proportionate world, or us? With their alterations come enormous enjoyment, discovery and through their intertwined representations our hearts are rewarded.
Writer and media critic Gareth Branwyn says of Ms. Mueller's work:
Myths, fairy tales, cave paintings, bestiaries, totems, medicine bags, fetish objects, curios, icons, storybooks, rituals, avatars, animal spirits. These are the nouns at work in Johanna Mueller's artistic lexicon. The verbs: engraving, printing, book making, sculpting, and painting. And the predicate that brings it all to life: embody.
Johanna Mueller has consciously chosen to work in a medium, printmaking that bears something of a stigma in the fine art world. She's also chosen to do work in miniature and artist books, two other humbled media. Just as she's willing to buck convention in pursuing the inspired subject of her work, she's also comfortable in the media that best give it form.
Recently, that's also encompassed painting, where she's become interested in playing with perceptual scale and the viewer's expectations. She has small-scale animal heads, sculpted from polymer clay and gold leaf, on wall plaques, letter pressed and hand-illuminated artists books, mid-size engraved prints, and large-size paintings, all depicting her various repeated creature motifs. “I want to play around with the microscopic and the macroscopic, the sense of scale in the room,” Mueller says. “I want to create something of a ritual space, to create the feeling of the symbolic spirits of my creations moving from one form into another. I think having these repeating forms taking on different shapes and sizes helps to convey that idea.”
Look closely at Ms. Mueller's work and another form of embodiment becomes readily apparent. Her own. “I see my art as itself a kind of idolic sacrifice. I sacrifice myself, my time, my body, my attention, to render these totemic representations.” She painstakingly carves her meaning, her intent, into these images in hopes that some of that intent might unwind on those who experience it. She says: “My own myth streams from the eyes and mouths of these animals, and yet they seek to accept the translation of the myth present in your life.”
