Brandstater Gallery re-opens with curated exhibit “Seeing the Elephant”

Titled “Thomas Müller: Seeing the Elephant” the show is curated by Damon Willick and will be on display through Nov.18. The exhibit features Mueller’s creative works in ceramics and other media.

Mueller, whose last name is also spelled in its German iteration as Müller, is chair of the Art, 3D department at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work in galleries throughout the U.S. and internationally. However “Seeing the Elephant” is a show unique to Brandstater Gallery and involves a mid-career retrospective as well as new works, he said. Mueller invited Willick, chair of the Art History department at Loyola Marymount University, to curate the exhibit.

Brandstater Gallery Director Tim Musso who is also an assistant art professor with La Sierra’s Art+Design department noted that the show is the gallery’s first onsite exhibition open to the campus and community since the university closed in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “I am excited to present the first public exhibition in over a year and half,” Musso said. “Thomas Müller's artwork is smart and provocative. This survey exhibition includes sculptures, participatory experiences, and kinetic time-based pieces, making gallery visits a must.”

Word power

Mueller has incorporated language into his ceramic work, creating evocative experiences and new perceptions with familiar words. The participatory works in his exhibit serve as a vehicle for immersion. “I'm interested in binding the viewer to the moment they experience the work,” Mueller said. “Fully recognizing it was something different before they experienced it and will be something different when they leave. The experience resides in their mind like a story.” 

The Brandstater exhibit includes words and phrases in white ceramic letters and in black pigment on the gallery floor. An interactive piece asks participants to add their signature in pencil after first erasing the signature of a previous participant. An exhibit of blue balloons, helium tank, string and water color drawings titled “Flower” involves helium-inflated balloons that have been tied each day to balloons that have settled, with subsequent balloons inflated and tied to the strings of others that have settled. “What starts with a single, helium balloon tied to a string expands into an ever-increasing mass of sapphire blue,” Mueller writes in an exhibit description. “The passage of time and the organizing principle of entropy are front and center in Flower’s daily inflation and descent.”

The show opened with an artist’s reception on Oct. 10 at the gallery during which Mueller gave a presentation to Art+Design students about his background, prior exhibits and artistic experiences, and how he segued into his current media and body of works involving words and phrases.

Language developed as an artistic expression during a European residency 10 years ago in Rotterdam when he was at a crossroads as an artist, Mueller said. For the students, he defined residencies as spaces artists are invited to use where they can freely engage in their work without distraction for two weeks to as long as a year, sometimes with materials provided, sometimes for free, sometimes with a fee involved. “Every time I’ve had an opportunity to do a residency, it’s a real inflection point in my work. A residency is to step out of the reality of your life [and focus on your art],” he said.

Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest port cities and an international crossroads where Mueller daily encountered a cornucopia of cultures and languages during his residency in a large, gallery-sized space which included a cot and a desk. At the time, “I was casting about for new directions,” he said. “I asked myself the question ‘What is more ephemeral than language itself?’ So, I decided to "make" language to explore notions of ephemarality, which in turn brought me back into ceramics as a material,” he said. “So this was kind of a turning point.”

During his talk, Mueller described to the students the experience of making molds for each letter, created in white ceramic to give the viewer a blank canvas from which to draw their own inferences, and his discovery of the fragility of those white ceramic letter pieces when they sometimes fell, or were accidentally knocked over, and shattered into bits. Although initially disconcerting, the destruction added a thought-provoking and beautiful element to the art work. He adds broken pieces to the works and creates ceramic words and phrases with an internal color which is revealed when broken, such as black or red.

“I wanted to make the work both literal and abstract at the same time, real words, real language but then as they tumble and collapse starts to become an abstraction,” he said.

Blurred boundaries

Mueller described to the students the process he uses of deciding which words to develop into ceramic pieces or in pigment dust to form phrases. Selected words are the result of making lists of words and working at them in a sketchbook or just writing. Once committed to using a phrase, he draws out what the ceramic pieces will look like. “I’m interested in phrases …that have double meanings or implications,” he said. “The phrases or words become Rorschach tests for [how] people respond to them and it’s always interesting. …In the beginning it was really hard because I’m not a writer, and it was hard to come to phrases. Now that I have done it for 10 years, I feel a little more comfortable with kind of manipulating the language and playing with it.”

He uses Helvetica typeface in creating art with words “because Helvetica is so ubiquitous, it’s boring. It’s almost a non-typeface, it doesn’t have a lot of personality.” The font incorporates negative space that holds the letters up, he said, “ and I thought that was so beautiful, and the whole point of my work was to collapse that space into one another. [I] kind of wanted to pop the bubble between the letters.”

Mueller “purposely blurs the artistic boundaries between sculptural, conceptual, and performance art in order to invite multiplicities of viewer engagement and response,” according to an exhibit statement by Willick. “The title of the exhibition, ‘Seeing the Elephant,’ was a popular phrase in nineteenth-century America to express the emotional anticipation—and, oftentimes, unmet expectations—which trans-continental migrants experienced as they settled the West.  Seeing the elephant was a balance between the sublime and the ordinary, aspirations and realities.”

Mueller holds bachelor and master’s degrees in ceramics from the University of Washington in Seattle and Cranbrook Academy of Art respectively, although he considers the medium one aspect of his overall artistic practice. He was born Cape Town, South Africa and lived there as well as in the United States and Europe during his childhood. These wide-ranging and rich experiences provided broad perspectives on life. “Ultimately, I think it's why I've developed an art practice that is hard to categorize. My work exists in multiple spaces at once and I'm very comfortable with that,” he said.

To make an appointment to view “Thomas Müller: Seeing the Elephant” at La Sierra’s Brandstater Gallery or for additional information, please visit https://lasierra.edu/brandstater/ or call 951-785-2170. Visitors to the gallery must wear face masks.