Carter Mull’s first exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann, The Day’s Specific Dreams, comprises five photographs, 1800 metallic prints scattered on the first floor, and a suite of drawings and a video on the gallery’s lower level. The new video work is simply presented and contained on a folding table. Mull’s all-over approach to the gallery space parallels his non-hierarchical stance on images: their making, the history of our relationship to and consumption of them, and what happens when we spit them back out. The exhibition’s title takes its cue from Stéphane Mallarmé’s essay, Un Spectacle Interrompu, (An Interrupted Spectacle) in which the author proposes that major cosmopolitan cities’ newspapers should chronicle the dreams of their population. This is a fitting proposal for Mull, who breaks apart the newspaper into temporal poetic fragments, erases differences between found images and ones of his own making, and buries the indexical potential of the photograph in favor of its ability to capture the abstract and elusive ruminations of our cultural imaginary.

The New York Times from January 30th to the 31st, 2011 and Diderot’s Encyclopédie act as starting points for the five framed photographs. The latter was the first comprehensive record of a culture’s output, artists and scientists were brought together to document and inform a nation, to create a noble tool to unite and transform man. In a sense the Encyclopédie was a progenitor of the newspaper itself, born of the early printing processes illustrated within it. In The Typist and Pen and Ink (all works 2011) Mull re-conceives the instructional images as seemingly electric and alive, he weaves them into and buries them beneath rainbow-hued colors and abstract, gestural, feathered lines. The hope to reflect and understand ourselves is nothing new, about as new as the News when it hits our hands. The Sisyphean quest to catch up with what we’ve just done is a centuries old pursuit. Far from illustrative, closer to phantasmagoria, Mulls photographs disperse their source material to productively conflate focus, perspective, and a sense of time. There is no nostalgia here, the photograph, an emulsified surface activated by light, is liquid and infinitely malleable only fixed because the artist stops, not because the process is inherently stoppable.

The 1800 frames of Connection are scattered across the gallery floor. Printed on metallic paper with black splotches on their surfaces, the prints are derived from an iPhone 4 commercial, broken down frame by frame. This piece disallows a comprehensive read- it basks in its heterogeneity, its reflective surface refracts light, images rest within images within images like Russian dolls, telescoping inwards and outwards simultaneously. Linearity is replaced by simultaneity, another flip of expectation that Mull seeks out in all of the works on view. The parallel here is to lived experience itself as there is no predicting what dreams will come of the day had, what dreams will do to the perception morning after, and how to tell our tales. It’s a continual game of catch up, a ceaseless cycling of consumption and excretion. Mull’s is a practice where multiple dialectics are in continuous exchange within images, singular, multiple, temporal.