She Knows She Is in Chicago
Marianne Mueller

Chicago Architecture Biennial: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, Sept. 16, 2017–Jan. 7, 2018

She Knows She Is in Chicago is one of nine photographic commissions curated by Jesús Vassallo under the title A Love of the World. Mueller takes snapshots of fragments of Chicago’s Cultural Center, prints them to scale, and wallpapers the interior surfaces of G. A. R. Hall’s mahogany vitrines. Shot on the oblique, the photographs are of such quotidian material moments as green marble meeting grey carpet and wood trim meeting white plaster. Within the vitrines, they operate at a 1:1 scale, producing effects that complete the existing hall, whether by extending it or acting as a threshold to another possible room beyond. To interact with these photographs requires finding a point of view and walking around them. By eschewing frontality, Mueller’s photographs produce impressive optical effects, imposing spatial responsibility upon the viewer. In ways more effective than those offered by many interior models arrayed throughout the same space, Mueller’s 2-D installations offer architecture itself, not merely a representation of it.