Stephen Mueller, video still from Starting Over.
Starting Over is a physical and digital record of a solitary durational performance that took place in Windsor, Ontario over an uninterrupted 55-hour, 16-minute and 39-second span of time (Friday, June 17, 2011 10:34:34 EDT – Sunday, June 19, 2011 17:51:13 EDT). During that period, Mueller manually extracted every beard hair from his face, one hair at a time, using a pair of surgical tweezers. Each hair was then placed directly into a specimen jar. Immediately following, two photographs were taken remotely: one of the front of his head and one of the back. The actual time length of the overall process determined the duration of the performance. The resulting sets of photographs were stitched together to produce time-lapse digital video loops, for projection onto two translucent suspended screens, eternally gazing at one another. The isopropanol-filled specimen jar stands between them, housed securely in a minimal white museum case.
Just as clothing and other quotidian objects become encrusted in memories of the places they’ve been worn, the events they’ve been a part of, or the people who have come into contact with them, human hair becomes a cemetery, filled with the living gravestones of our past relationships and experiences. However, unlike an old and tattered pair of shoes, which can be easily removed and placed on the top shelf of a dark closet for future reminiscence or disposal, hair stays with us. Dyed, cut, or shaven, the roots remain hidden beneath our skin, sheltered by their follicles. Therefore, it is only through their meticulous and complete removal that one may physically extricate oneself from the past and begin anew.
In Starting Over, the past and the future are forced to confront one another in an endless loop of self-dissection, with the seemingly futile belief that, through repetition of a cathartic act, fear and regret may prove themselves tangible and, thus, more easily defined, organized and conceivably overcome. Yet, in truth, it is the conception, execution and successful achievement of the formidable goal itself, which serves as an architect of self-confidence and, consequently, a suppressor of the greater, more encompassing unconscious terrors of perceived human failure and encroaching quiescence.
Still Believing is a live durational performance that will take place at Artcite Incorporated in Windsor, Ontario, from June 7, 2013 to August 3, 2013. The duration of the performance will be determined by Artcite’s current gallery operating hours (four days per week; five hours per day) and will thus be divided into equal time-lengths over thirty-four days, for approximately one hundred and seventy total hours.
A plain, rectangular white table will be placed in the center of one side of the gallery floor. Two matching chairs will stand at opposing ends of the table, facing one another. Balanced precariously on its side on one of the chairs, seemingly magically, will stand a well-used, medium-size dining table, upon which will likewise be perched its own four matching well-used wooden chairs, linked and stacked, one on top of the next. Shrouded in opaque white sheets, Mueller will sit motionless in the second chair for the duration of the exhibition—a ghostly, persistent presence in silent, focused dialogue with a displaced group of memory-laden objects from his familial past.
With Still Believing, Mueller endeavors not only to conjure and reconfigure, through appropriations of both form and metaphor, past artistic and pop cultural works, such as Marina Abramovic’s relational The Artist is Present (2010), the several incarnations of Abramovic and Ulay’s Nightsea Crossing (1981-87), Antonius Block’s futile chess match with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), and numerous examples of paranormal furniture-stacking and manipulation in films like Tobe Hooper’s classic, Poltergeist (1982), or the more recent Paranormal Activity franchise (2007-present), but through these reconfigurations, to poetically and poignantly confront his own personal, stubborn wraiths of longing, disappointment, failure and regret, inviting viewers to draw emotional and objective comparisons to their own lives and find purpose in desperate hopefulness.
A native of Windsor, Stephen Mueller lives and works in London, Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor (2004) and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts from the University of Calgary (2006). He is currently a project-based PhD student in Art and Visual Culture at The University of Western Ontario. His performance work has been exhibited across Canada, with upcoming exhibitions programmed for 2013-14 in Calgary, AB (UAS Satellite Gallery), St. John, NB (Third Space Gallery), Edmonton, AB (Latitude 53) and Victoria, BC (Open Space), among others. Website