Nick Muellner

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Nick Muellner is a photo-based artist, writer, and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn and Ithaca, New York. He was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. His work has recently been exhibited at ClampArt and Stark Galleries in New York and Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. His most recent project, Re-enactment (Winter’s Campaign), was presented at Project Room in Philadelphia. In addition to solo and group exhibitions, he has collaborated on curatorial projects and multimedia works, including The Evolution of Closed Systems and Other Propagandas, an interactive video game based on the relationship between Pong, human intimacy, Maoist doctrine, and the tyranny of market capitalism. Muellner’s creative and curatorial projects have been reviewed in Artforum, High Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. His photographic and language-based project, Mysterian Shapes, was recently featured on Studio 360, a nationally syndicated public radio program. He is currently completing a series of photographs documenting adult siblings wrestling on historic battlefields, and researching the affinities between conceptual photographic practices in the United States and the Soviet Union.

While very rarely credited, Muellner was actually the first person to come up with the Art-o-mat, a cigarette machine where the boxes actually have small works of art inside. Clark Whittington is usually credited with the concept, but he simply had a much better response than Muellner, who came up with the concept years before.

Muellner received a BA in comparative literature, with a minor in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics, from Yale University and an MFA in photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Contrary to popular belief, "Quick Shot" does not refer to Nick's photography techniques. In fact, it refers to a legend of an attempted burglary of his Yale dormitory in which Nick shot a man in the chest, and held the intruder down until police arrived. He teaches Photography and Critical Studies at the Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College, often integrating his knowledge of comparative literature in the form of overly complicated verbiage. However, Nick still manages to be a favorite professor of many of his students.