When considering the nature of consciousness, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the qualities of the world are inseparable from the bodies through which we experience them. The sun is blinding because of our light-sensitive eyes. Heaviness is the awareness of the struggle between our muscles and the object we are trying to lift. Mullen’s fifteen paintings inhabit this space between perception and experience, considering how the world becomes available to us subjectively. When showering, swimming, or drinking, the wonderfully psychedelic distortions of water take a backseat to the projects of cleaning, playing, or quenching thirst. When set to the task of driving a nail, a hammer becomes invisible in our grip. We don’t see it, we see through it. 

The paintings are generated through the concept of mutation—organized as five series and two stand-alone works containing mutations within them. Like a game of telephone, each painting distorts, draws out, or transforms a formal, narrative, or conceptual element from another. A shape, structure, or figure passes from one painting to the next, changing through repetition and context, creating a time-lapse evolution of Mullen’s visual language and processes. 

The exhibition’s title work depicts empty sleeves and pant legs that remain upright despite the absence of limbs. Hands emerge to grasp an arm, press a button, or tend to a drooping flower. Patched clothing conjures bodies long gone, while movement and expression persist in their absence. In Post World New World Bootstrappier, bones weave through a swarm of leaning shapes. They might be striving to assemble into a skeleton or scaffolding, while the figure’s mallet-wielding arm becomes lost among them. In Sight Us Invert Us, pairs of bulging, megaphone-like eyes are pressed up against an intestinal grid—a reimagining of internal organs as isolated bodies with distinct nervous systems and the dominant sense of sight. Magician’s Assistant depicts a figure descending stairs with four legs spanning two door-sized abutting canvases, causing a seam down the middle of the painting. Is her doubling a cubist consequence of motion or—like the woman who gets sawed in half—does she need two sets of legs to do the trick? 

Across the exhibition, visual devices either facilitate embodiment or create a barrier. Staggered panels disrupt the rectangle and call attention to the artifice of the painting, while brick walls, pipes, bars, veins, blinds, mortar, and strands of hair function as passageways, blockages, or frames. Mullen’s paintings begin as abstractions, with formal codes prioritized over narrative. Nothing is sketched beforehand. Shapes, negative spaces, and errant marks are repurposed as figures, and structures emerge according to the conditions established by the composition. Mutation becomes a sympathetic evolutionary response, allowing her to arrive at forms of understanding through the act of making and looking. 

Mullen’s paintings move continually between figure and structure, body and object, abstraction and representation. They propose the painting as an adjacent body, a place where contradictory versions of the self can coexist, where what is felt can exist physically, and where the boundaries between things remain in flux. What is heavy, hard, visible, animate, or bodily is never entirely fixed. It emerges through the relationship between the perceiving body and the world it encounters.