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I am interested in a way of looking at the world, not in an idea. I am not looking for something; rather, I find things. I am looking for situations where my innermost is mirrored by the outer world.
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Marianne Mueller’s exhibited Combine (1995-2005) as part of her DREAM-US-09 show, was on view in March 2009 at Kim Light/LightBox Gallery in California.
I am interested in a way of looking at the world, not in an idea. I am not looking for something; rather, I find things. I am looking for situations where my innermost is mirrored by the outer world.
To me, the world is physical. There is a chair. Like an apparition, it transfixes my gaze, and slowly it turns into an image. Is the chair looking at me? It displays itself to my eye. I walk around the chair. It doesn’t talk to me, yet it somehow seduces me. I go back to the starting point and take a picture of the chair: one more time. I am looking at the chair through my camera. The chair requires something else. Then suddenly something happens: it feels as if the camera and the chair interact all on their own. I let them, since I know what my camera needs. I feel somewhat beside myself. This is probably the state that I am looking for when I take pictures, a state of intense dedication and abandonment, of mutual penetration. I want touch.
I am waiting. I am looking at all the images on a roll of film—the chair, mountains, bodies, houses, mishaps, fortuitous chances, and souvenirs. I am working. When I edit my images, I feel de-centered. I don’t exist. My hands react to what my eyes see. I am merely a filter. Chronology fulfills a purpose in my work—not in the sense of a linear understanding of time, but because everything closely relates to everything else. It all leads back to the first idea. A roll of film is a secret entity. It is the trace of lived life in all of its primal disorder. Intuitively, I try to grasp it, yet most of the time it remains elusive.
Much later, there is the will to bring the images together, to create relations, correspondences, distinctions and distances. Combining images is a method to stabilize meaning.
Combine explores a way of looking at the world that manifests itself once you leave behind the orders of chronology, subject matter, and memory. I depart from my own archive and its structure and start to combine images taken in various contexts. There are mirror effects, doublings, contrasts, a kind of kaleidoscopic effect disrupting linear time, its parallels, and its sequential logic. An abstract fiction starts to emerge from my visual vocabulary.
It’s all about reduction, or in the words of Wallace Stevens, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
