Writing on Carter Mull for Artforum, Michael Ned Hote noted “…the impossibility of quarantining ‘the photographic,’ particularly in its digital states.” responding to how Mull’s work re-cast our ideas of contemporary artistic practice. 

 

In Televisuality, Mull presents the beginnings of a multi-year project.  Here, ten works on aluminum carriages made with materials ranging from printed, stretched and folded organza, overprinted iridescent foil, and glitter infused archival resin hang in clear sequence. Mull sets the tone with works that assume the structure and appearance of painting in the traditional sense, yet also conjure a re-formation and re-structuring of art today. Mull’s use of drawing and imaging (as opposed to self identification with a given métier) acts to guide his inquiry into a larger conception of art making that transcends object production. Writing in the current issue of Los Angeles based publication Flaunt, Shana Nys Dambrot describes a core characteristic of Mull’s project as: “Not telegenic, as in looking good on TV. Televisual, as in his work being inherently predisposed to its own dissemination. Neither a specific aesthetic or medium, televisuality is a quality d’esprit.”

 

The energy of an image seeking a form infects Mull’s work as a whole. From years acting as creative director of a collaboratively conceived community newspaper to a recent collaboration with Guess via an invitation from the Marciano Art Foundation, Mull’s process-based conceptualism infuses with his interest in mediation to, in turn, synthesize the ephemerality of the image with hand made, indexical, embedded states of information. Whether making a couture jacket, an artist magazine, or a static object for the wall, art history becomes nimble in Mull’s project. He re-works social and visual strategies employed by canonical figures from Andy Warhol to Sigmar Polke to Isa Genzken – to name a few. Such agility allows Mull’s project to simultaneously address contemporary cultural conditions. Televisuality engages us with a dialogue regarding the liminal manifestation of new systems of culture for our rapidly changing climate. Sensitive to the relationship between time and subjectivity, Mull’s artistic language takes into account the social drive and dimension of the contemporary subject.  His work speaks to the basic units by which we trade connective desires and emotional responses, marking the moments that bind us together. 

 

Mull continually builds upon his engagement internationally at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the MAK Center, Los Angeles; The David Roberts Foundation, London; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and others. Born in 1977, his work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, LACMA and Hammer Museums in Los Angeles and the Whitney and MoMA collections in New York. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, CAPC Bordeaux in France, Fused Space, San Francisco and Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca. He spent key formative years in New York. Although he travels often, he has been based in Los Angeles since 2004.