Barry Schwabsky on Bridget Mullen

At first, the imagery in Bridget Mullen’s canvases for her present “Quitters” appeared tough to parse; however I ultimately discovered my approach into her world by grooving to the works’ facture. As a result of she makes use of the ultra-matte vinyl paint Flashe, usually together with acrylic or spray paint, the work’ surfaces look very dry, which someway conflicts, within the eye’s thoughts, with the fluidity of her slyly workmanlike mark-making. The colour is thinly utilized in layers so {that a} sense of depth, quantity, and plasticity coexists with an acute feeling for the flat floor—one other perceptual conundrum. The impact is counterseductive in a curious approach; it makes for a stance that’s analytical but in addition intimately bodily—a type of deliberated immediacy. Impulse and management create an uneasy equilibrium.

One thing related may be stated of the work’ imagery, consisting primarily of sliced and diced bits of cartoony figures, principally limbs and heads, all “squeezing, bulging, marching, mirroring, hovering, shapeshifting, being and turning into hair,” as Aschely Cone writes within the exhibition textual content. Reinterpreted from their distant Looney Tunes or Mad journal sources by way of Philip Guston and the Chicago Imagists, these unmoored physique components have been perversely recombined in arbitrary ways in which owe rather a lot to Surrealism, although at occasions with an overlay of rhythmic repetition à la Italian Futurism. Not that Mullen is taking part in “spot that reference,” nevertheless; no matter she’s taken from her elective antecedents has been synthesized into a method custom-made for her rueful and ironic evocation of a subjectively perceived corporeal expertise. Sometimes the outcomes are almost straightforwardly figurative, as in Free to Be You and Me, 2021—that includes a ruddy head that appears no much less grotesque for being principally hidden by a pair of fingers daintily tied along with a blue ribbon and revealing an enormous pair of heavy-lidded, bloodshot blue eyes—however often issues are much less legible. One other portrait-like composition, Easels Browsers, 2022, likewise focuses on a head and fingers, however this time the fingers are manipulating—washing? arranging?—a blond coif. Below that hair and people squinting eyes, is that actually a face, a head?—or is it a noseless, mouthless stump? And are these fleshy bulges slightly below the eyes displaced cheeks or cleavage? In any case, Mullen offers the picture simply sufficient readability to make its final indecipherability extra pointed. Uncertainty emerges as a reality value hanging onto. Because the artist as soon as stated in an interview, “Confusion and displacement are simply as fascinating as hyperawareness.” Should you regarded right into a mirror and noticed this alien creature assembly your gaze, you’d have to just accept it was the true you . . . and perhaps study to love it.

Elsewhere, Mullen runs her recombinant psychobiological creations towards extra summary ends. Moderately than the imagistic centrality teased by the elusive prospect of a face, allover patterning involves the fore—see, as an illustration, the multiplying arms and red-gloved, stick-wielding fingers within the decrease portion of Future Farmers, 2022, although doing so could not make any clearer what you’re within the portray’s high half; the final impact is of a system of natural pistons in operation. However, for all that, the piece was the closest factor to “fairly” within the present. Refracting via Quitters (2), 2019–22, is a pair of near-identical striding figures, all limbs and hair however faceless and with out torsos, although clothed in purple, or may they maybe be a single determine seen at completely different cut-off dates, as soon as booted, as soon as barefoot? The motion through which they/it are caught up—which can be someway that of the area this multidimensional being makes an attempt to traverse—is extra like a fractured stasis. Cone sees the quitting of the work’s title as a gesture towards freedom, however the portray appears skeptical of escape as an choice.

— Barry Schwabsky