Aug 25–Nov 30, 2018
Bridget Mullen (23), Live Wires
About
Lighthouse Works is delighted to announce Bridget Mullen’s Live Wires, our final show of 2018.
Live Wires explores points of connection and contingency, both physical and metaphysical. Mullen uses figures, and elements of figuration, to consider how we bond and touch; her never-ending figures hook arms and clay links intertwine, exhibiting dependencies. Her work oscillates between the polarities of the figurative and abstract, the melodic and dissonant, and the security of togetherness and the anxiety of impermanence.
Play is a vital part of Mullen’s practice. Using improvisation, jarring scale shifts, and unique color relationships, she’s able to bond together chaotic layers to create a tenuous symbiosis. Mullen uses these same strategies to create her sculptures. By fashioning separate clay links she ultimately constructs and conceives of the pieces simultaneously, in the moment of their installation. And like the paintings that hang nearby, these clay links point to the act of transformation, of becoming.
The power of Mullen’s work is rooted in the uncertainty of its making. Working circuitously without plans, she determines her figures free-associatively, responding to formal propositions instead of consciously building a narrative. She discovers her subjects in the possibilities of the abstractions becoming figurative—often exercising restraint in over-clarifying an image that teeters between being nameable and abstract. Mullen’s work remains ambiguous to sustain uncertainty as a way of accepting the anxiety of the constantly changing present moment. In this way, she fuses joy with the unknown.
Artist
Bio
Bridget Mullen holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a BAE from Drake University. She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, The Jan Van Eyck Academie, The Lighthouse Works, Roswell Artist-In-Residence Program, The Fine Arts Work Center, VCCA, and Yaddo. Her recent solo exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and recent group exhibitions include Anne Barrault, Paris, France; Bosse & Baum, London, UK; Nathalie Karg, New York, NY; Wild Palms, Düsseldorf, Germany; DC Moore, New York, NY; Fahrenheit Madrid, Madrid, Spain; and L21, Mallorca, Spain. She is the recipient of the 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship, the 2017–2018 recipient of a studio from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and the 2018–2019 participant in the Shandaken Paint School. Mullen’s work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Maake Magazine, and ArtMaze. Her work is in the collections of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, NM, and the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA.