Selfie Cult, 2015

The Selfie Cult project, conceived and curated by Uta Brauser and brought to life by Mueller, unfolded against the backdrop of Bushwick’s Morgan Walls, a canvas of 12-foot cinderblock walls encircling a cement factory on Morgan Avenue.

Mueller embarked on a personal journey by sifting through a trove of selfies captured on their iPhone over the span of a six years, beginning in 2010. What Mueller unearthed was a remarkable pattern of consistency in these self-portraits: a preferred angle and a consistent arm's length distance. With this uniformity, Mueller crafted 16 collages, each composed of two images. These self-portraits wove together moments from different points in time, creating a visual narrative of the evolution of self-expression.

These self-portraits came to life as street art, wheat-pasted onto a segment of a white wall. In the dynamic urban environment, they took on a life of their own. Soon, the walls began to respond, first, with a black sinus-curve-like line and graffiti commentary atop the work.

Selfie Cult beckoned viewers to reconsider the narratives inherent in self-portraits and to witness the dynamic interplay between artist, environment, and the inexorable passage of time. Eventually, the selfies, symbols of vanity, faded, leaving behind ghostly rectangles with paper traces.