kelly anne mueller

sorry for your loss

Sep 26 - Oct 26, 2025

FIRST WEDNESDAY OPENING: oct 1, FROM 6 - 9PM

ARTICULATE ARTIST TALK: SUNDAY, oct 5, AT 4PM.

NORMAL GALLERY HOURS: TUE - SUN, 12PM - 6PM

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Often large and textural, Kelly Anne Mueller’s paintings and drawings center on the tension between natural forces and systems, and the human tendency to subvert these systems. She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University and is currently a member of The Front Gallery in New Orleans, and Baton Rouge Gallery. She attends artist residencies whenever possible outside of her teaching, including such places as Hambidge, GA; Stone House, CA; Philadelphia Art Hotel, Dorland Mountain Art Colony, and a research trip to the Amazon Rainforest as a Surdna Fellow. Hiking, camping, canoeing, fishing, and being with her favorite people bring her great joy.

“Milestones in my early 50’s have begun to quietly shift from weddings to funerals, and from birthday parties to caring for aging parents and loved ones. Roadkill Reliquary emerged from meditations on the inevitability of death, but also on the beauty, fragility, and wondrous impossibility of consciousness. Stopping to document each species in its place felt like an act of reverence, and tracing over each delicate feature with color became homage that transcended the death itself and turned into a quiet prayer.
The stretch of I-10 between my New Orleans home and my mother’s in Slidell stretched through Bayou Sauvage. I’d often turn off my radio and allow my mind to wander, watching the roiling cumulus clouds over Lake Pontchartrain churn themselves into ascending towers, echoing the mudbug castles lining the ditches below. A concrete barrier divided the 4-lane highway for months of ongoing construction, and so the stretch was heavily riddled with wetland roadkill, the bright red and black viscera winding and rooting into my interstate meditations like tiny capillaries.
I stopped. I took pictures. Odd, I know. Initially it was curiosity, I think; an admiration for the diversity offered by the swamp, perhaps a desire to identify and study. There was bewilderment; this road viscera was very recently sentient, experienced the world through her own clear eyes, breathed the salty green scent of the marsh, felt the gulf wind tousle her dense fur on the same hide that then stretched in some degree of disintegration across the asphalt. The earth welcomed back the pelt, the tissue, it would rebuild; what of the sentience?
Occasionally there was a house pet, the sweet jowls and soft paws that likely rested softly across the lap of a loved companion.
They’re such transformative entities, death and grief, but yet so universal. A footprint speaks both presence and absence: she was in this very place, she is gone. What of the ghost? Am I steward? Am I complicit?” -Mueller

This exhibition is presented alongside the latest works from Leslie Elliottsmith & Scott Finch. All works from these artists are on view, free of charge, during regular gallery hours (12 - 6 p.m., Tue - Sun) from Sep 26 - Oct 26, 2025.