Nicholas Muellner, The Nautiloid Heart

No Show Space is pleased to present The Nautiloid Heart, an installation of new photographs by Nicholas Muellner. Through books, exhibitions and slide lectures, Muellner operates at the intersection of image and language. His projects investigate the limits of photography as a documentary pursuit and as an interface to literary, political and personal narratives.

The Nautiloid Heart is a shipwrecked novel. Occasionally, its flotsam washes up on foreign shores: images, allegories and scraps of lore. In this exhibition of salvage from a vanished book, photographs and text fragments evoke this tropical-gothic tale, set on the tiny island of Little Corn, sixty miles off the coast of Nicaragua. Over the past 500 years, the island has been a Carib Indian way-station, a pirate hideaway, a hunting ground for Spanish and British sailors, an American coconut plantation, a Nicaraguan penal colony, a drug-runners’ haven and a beach retreat for backpackers. Photographing on the island between 2009 and 2012, the artist asked: how does one document a landscape so subject to the vicissitudes of other peoples’ imaginations? The Nautiloid Heart is an incomplete fiction, set in a version of a real place. On a land defined by passing fancy, depiction and projection momentarily converge.

Nicholas Muellner (b. 1969) is a photographer and writer based in central New York. His recent textual and visual books include The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009), and The Amnesia Pavilions (A-Jump Books, 2011). He has given readings at numerous venues in the United States and Europe, including MoMA P.S.1 and Union Docs in New York.