STATEMENT
I use my body to make long durational works about depression, loss, futility, and loneliness. I usually perform them live for several hours, days, or weeks, but sometimes I perform alone in front of a camera. Occasionally, I’ll create interactive or participatory installations with objects that others can touch or perform with, but I prefer solitary repetition and slow scenes. I’m interested in reflections and reverberations, and the universality of aloneness. I want to amplify aloneness and explore it as an aesthetic. I do that by moving slowly and deliberately through improvised actions and re-performances, and by being there and continuing to do that, even when nobody’s around. I’m interested in melancholic spaces. I’m interested in conjuring palpable intimacy to create delicate and transitory connections between myself and others. To do that I endure analogous representations until the performance stops feeling like a performance. Then I keep going. I miss a lot of feelings and moments and things, so I try to recreate them. I think we all do that. I find it hard to relax but I want to. I wonder if you feel that way too.
BIO
Stephen Mueller is a performance and installation artist, arts worker, and arts educator based in Windsor, Ontario. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Calgary and a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. His work has been exhibited in artist-run centres across Canada, including Open Space (Victoria), Eastern Edge (St. John’s), The New Gallery (Calgary), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), Forest City Gallery (London), and Artcite Inc. (Windsor). His durational performances have been featured in numerous festivals, including: Words and [ ]: A Durational Conference of Art and Thought (Montréal), the 2016 Duration and Dialogue Performance Art Festival (Toronto), M:ST 7 (Calgary), Visualeyez 13 (Edmonton) and the 2011 Art Gallery of Windsor Biennial. In April 2020, he initiated the collaborative Instagram project Performing Together. He is currently the Programming Director at Artcite Inc. and an on/off sessional instructor at the University of Windsor School of Creative Arts.