img. Photography is from Jay Muhlin’s exhibit and book Kid.
Jay Muhlin’s Kid is a multi-media installation, that is on show until January 21st at the Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, exploring how images are mediated through intimate relationships. Featuring kinetic elements, tactile photographs, and scent, the exhibit considers how photography offers the very building blocks of our current physical and social world. Set in the wilds of NJ suburbia, the artist shares images that document his relationship with a young girl who he is helping raise to underscore the fragility and sweetness within everyday rituals. Kid is Muhlin’s final member show with Vox Populi which builds upon and concludes his previous series of exhibitions/book output, including Guilty Pleasures and Sleeve On My Heart.
As Deborah Krieger says on Hyperallergic review, “The combination of photography with scent is a curious, if slightly unsettling one. Photography is still held to have some measure of honesty, or a documentary nature to the images it captures (or, more accurately, creates); yet smell is less objective, since it conjures up memories and associations in immediate, primal, and affective ways. I wondered, as I looked at these girlhood snapshots — of her grimacing for the camera in plastic vampire teeth, or lying facedown in a bank of snow — whether my perception was being manipulated by that sweet smell, which primes us to feel happy and at peace.”
Jay instead explains about his works: “Kid is something i can offer her, like a cat offering a mouse. Sometimes sad songs have happy lyrics, but sometimes happy songs have sad lyrics. The images are made to be felt as much as they are seen.”
Jay Muhlin has a BFA in Photography from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and an MFA in Transmedia/Photography from Syracuse University. His images have appeared in the LA Weekly, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Mother Jones, PDN, Metropolis, and The Village Voice. He completed residencies that include the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, The Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY, and the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy, NY. Muhlin recently completed a photography grant to document the South Asian Art Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and teaches photography at The College of New Jersey, Rowan, and La Salle universities. He is an Artist Member of the Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, and the 2014 Esther & Harvey Graitzer Memorial Prize winner for photography. Muhlin is currently working as the photographer at the Chemical Heritage Foundation photographing scientific cultural heritage collections for documentation and interpretation.
