Curated by Damon Willick.
Seeing the Elephant: Thomas Müller surveys the artist’s career-long interest in the dynamism of myth, liminality, and entropy. Professionally active in Los Angeles since the early-2000s, Müller’s work defies easy categorization or reception. Chair of USC’s Ceramics Program, Müller purposely blurs the artistic boundaries between sculptural, conceptual, and performance art in order to invite multiplicities of viewer engagement and response. 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. Müller mines similar terrain in this selected mid-career survey where opposition implies connection and the ephemerality of language pushes against the stability of the object.
