Lindsay Mueller
Lindsay Mueller is a painter whose practice investigates local areas of landscape through her sculptural paintings. Mueller works to understand the multifaceted relationships humans have with outdoor spaces, and she is drawn to sites of decay, interconnection, and ambiguity. Her work is influenced by American tendencies to romanticize nature, and she often explores personal and communal narratives projected onto landscape.
Mueller grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in Arlington, Virginia. She received a BFA in Painting and a BA in Psychology from Boston University (2019), and an MFA in Visual Arts from American University (2024).
She has exhibited her work across the East Coast at venues including Stable (DC), Studio Gallery (DC), the American University Museum (DC), MoCA Arlington (VA), the University of Mary Washington (VA), Gallery B (MD), Brentwood Arts Exchange (MD), MarketView Arts at York College (PA), and Laconia Gallery (MA). In 2023, Mueller was awarded the Bethesda Painting Young Artist Award, and she is a recipient of the Carol Bird Ravenal Art Award for artistic research from American University. Most recently, she was published in I Like Your Work’s MFA Catalog, and she was a Four Pillars Artist in Residence at Mount Gretna School of Art (PA).
Mueller values the ability of art to build community, and she has worked extensively with adults and children teaching art classes and developing community arts programming. She currently teaches at American University and the Washington Studio School.
Artist Statement
My landscape paintings use light and shadow as a physical subject while considering the outdoor spaces, often parks and roadsides, close to me. I am interested in the layers of time and collective use of public spaces, and I try to observe closely the sheer amount of visual information that exists when outdoors—too much information to ever truly know. In reference to this visual overabundance, I use plaster to draw textures beneath the paint in my work. I reference leaf patterns, cast light, and other ephemeral forms from nature when creating this low relief. In sculpting my surfaces, I am also able to reference rock and mineral forms, creating chunky surfaces to be painted upon that often feel aged and pulled from the earth itself.
I am interested in how the paintings both imitate the experience of landscape and become their own layer of experience, materializing traces of natural encounters into solid form. As my brush responds to the surface topography and landscape imagery, the works accumulate a mix of location-based information and personal self-invention. As I continue working, I imbue emotive qualities into the work, creating layers of romanticism, anxiety, dread, and wonder. Like many people, I fluctuate between states of awe and gratitude for nature’s resilience, disgust yet complicity in various human actions, and alarm for our future. I aim to make work that reflects this unfixed quality in its composition, while creating an overarching unsureness of the work’s stability despite its physical weight. How real is this space? Where does it rupture?
Color contributes to this process, and I use fluorescent and metallic paints to create visceral flashes against deep, chromatic passages. I use acidic colors such as quinacridone and cadmium chartreuse to indicate that the nature depicted is touched by my hand and not purely “natural,” while also referencing the mysterious perceptual magic of experiencing light shifting in nature. More recently, metallic paints have become important, using them to reference precious metals originally of the earth. As golds, coppers, and silvers adorn the paintings, they also function with human-affected meaning, attaching value systems that have been harmful to natural spaces over centuries—while ironically also showing deep care for the fragments of nature depicted in the work and the craftsmanship of making. Built up over time, these works transform my personal ventures into nature into tactile reflections of landscape dynamics, considering the complex intersections of human relationships with our built natural world.
www.lindsaymuellerart.com
