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In film after film, including his latest, Dark Waters, the director Todd Haynes asks viewers to contend with ambiguity, writes John Lahr in the New Yorker: “Dark Waters subverts by taking the legal thriller—a form that traditionally concludes with the triumph of good over evil—into areas of psychological complexity and ambiguity. All investigative stories, he told me, when we met in Los Angeles in June, have the burden of revealing a truth. ‘What I love so much about the genre,’ he explained, ‘is the cost of revealing the truth. The drama of that, and what it does to people. That is the part that kills you.’

Mueller, who teaches painting at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, talks to Art in America’s Steel Stillman about the evolution of her work in video, audio, performance, and alternative ways of painting. “I came to understand that the trajectory for my work was to move deeper into the studio and toward painting as a receding horizon,” says Mueller. “At the same time, I was beginning to feel overly safe and in control. I’d become fairly good at negotiating the processes and decisions involved in making the drawings that became enamel paintings and rugs. What would happen if I removed some of that mediation and started to use a brush? I wanted to challenge myself, to operate across a fuller spectrum.”