Alluvium is a confluence of geology, street repair work and an archeological site.

In this piece, sculpture and photography are used as a system designed to create the context and meaning we need to unravel the partial view we have of time and place, much like the micro-history seen on just one page of a history book, or one photograph or one core sample. The exhibition space is designed as an excavation site populated with unfamiliar tools and findings scattered across the space. The work moves through the surface to the sedimented layers of rock and dirt below, allowing the process to slowly fill with detail. The structures are designed to invoke the formality of architecture and organic, natural forms. This blending of art and archeology is an effort to offer a wide view of the world while articulating a personal universe experienced in the urban and natural landscape.

Robert Smithson writes that art should, “explore the pre– and post–historic mind: it must go where remote futures meet remote pasts.” As I look out onto the horizon I become conscious that I am a small mark, a molecule in the expansive field of topography and meaning.

Theo Mullen is an artist living and working in Charlottesville, Virginia. He received a BFA from the University of Colorado Denver in 2008 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 with a certificate in Time Based Media. He teaches photography at the University of Virginia. Mullen has shown at the Franz Joseph Kai 3 Gallery in Vienna, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Gaff Gallery in Vancouver, and other cities including Philadelphia, Austin and Denver. He is a fellow the Vermont Studio Center and Starry Night Retreat in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He is the recipient of the Charles Addams Memorial Prize from the University of Pennsylvania and two research grants that funded him to photograph his hometown of New Orleans in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina between 2005-08.