Elberto Muller
Vacant Hand

September 9th - October 21st, 2023

Entrance presents ‘Vacant Hand’ the solo debut of artist and writer Elberto Muller on view in both our ground floor and lower level galleries. ‘Vacant Hand’ showcases a survey of Muller’s three-dimensional mosaic tile works, a practice he has developed over the past five years. The works reference folktales, pop-iconography and pulp sub-cultures, capturing landscapes and vignettes with an overt playfulness in tone. Living mostly as a drifter, Muller’s work draws from his experiences riding freight trains, planes and autos across North America, crossing and recrossing the country through a covert network of rail and road maps, resources and guides maintained by fellow travelers. The myriad of faces, characters and stories told in the works in ‘Vacant Hand’ bring the viewer into a world, an underground, to witness a disorienting reflection of a distorted culture. A humorous disenchantment with the ‘narcotic state of contemporary humanity’ and its diversions.

Along with maintaining a studio practice, Muller is a novelist, having recently published ’Graffiti On Low or No Dollars: An Alternative Guide to Aesthetics and Grifting Throughout the United States and Canada’ with Outlandish Press in August, 2023. In the course of his travels he has scattered hundreds of small mosaic tile works across the continent, which have become landmarks frequently sought out and documented by his avid followers.

Press
Elberto Muller's Hand is Vital in "Vacant Hand" @ Entrance, NYC - Evan Pricco, Juxtapoz

“We got to the outskirts of Mobile around dark where our train sat in the woods for a few hours, taking its time on the slow descent into town. The gulf air settled in, chilling us to the bone. The line we rode was all empty grain cars– the fact that we rode at the back of the nearly mile long line meant that with every start and stop of the train, the shudder back through the couplings would build to a momentous crescendo and boom– we smacked our heads into the steel wall behind us, again and again– in the morning, goose eggs on our skulls. That yard in Mobile, on an island downtown, difficult to access or escape. Not much sleep that night-too cold-we sat for hours under the blinking city lights, wondering if the train would ever leave, shivering on that grain porch, finally drifting off in the wee hours, the smallest hours of the new day, and in our collective sleeps felt it, the slow squeal and lurch, the train pulling forward under the gulf sky now drained of stars with the blue milk of dawn diluting the deeper blue...”

Graffiti On Low or No Dollars: An Alternative Guide to Aesthetics and Grifting Throughout the United States and Canada by Elberto Muller, Outlandish Press 2023