Art Institute of Chicago
September 19 – January 18, 2027
By Annette LePique
Director David Lynch used the phrase “a woman in trouble” to describe actress Laura Dern’s performance as Nikki Grace in his 2006 film Inland Empire, another actress caught inside a mirror-maze of nightmarish fantasy. The phrase is also an apt term for actress Gena Rowlands’ many collaborations with her long-term partner director John Cassavetes, like Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), or Opening Night (1977). Rowlands forever excelled at portraying women on the verge of something: transcendence, a nervous breakdown, greatness, a radical reconfiguration of her own life.
Jill Mulleady. Love Streams, 2026. © Jill Mulleady. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur.
This magnetic presence lends itself to artist Jill Mulleady’s painting Love Streams (2026), in which Rowlands and Cassavetes are captured mid-embrace. Although, the two are rendered more like the Pietà than Rodin’s Kiss—desperate more than erotic—against a backdrop of luminous neon lights and an indistinct cityscape behind them. The title of the painting is inspired by the duo’s 1984 film of the same name in which Rowlands and Cassavetes play a brother and sister whose lives implode against various interpersonal conflicts and falling outs (Rowlands buys Cassavetes a menagerie of large animals with the hope they could teach him how to express love). The film is a primer for desperate living, of loneliness, and the tenuousness and vulnerability of true connection.
Mulleady’s show The Passenger, up now at the Art Institute of Chicago, contends with these same ideas through the artist’s long-held interest in examining why we want what we want. What exactly shapes desire? What forms does the act of wanting take, and how can longing change your life? These are the metaphorical sieves through which Mulleady pours a collection of cultural, literary, and film references to create dream-like vignettes, uneasy fairy tales rendered in oil on velvet canvases. The stories that Mulleady paints have no easy resolution; they are disquieting, open-ended, and non-linear. Often, viewers are dropped in the middle of the painting’s action. Things have already happened, characters are fully formed, and we’re left to figure out what this jumble of life could mean.
Though there’s no demand for meaning to be made here, it is a compulsion, an impulse born through the act of witnessing. Funny enough, Mulleady considers the figure of the passenger to be an archetype, a witness, forever new, moving through time and space in a passive reverie. A passenger, after all, is defined through lack of action. You’re just along for the ride.
Jill Mulleady. The Passenger, 2026. © Jill Mulleady. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur.
In the artist’s painting The Passenger (2026), a woman and a man help an elderly man walk across a city walkway illuminated by bruised moonlight. Behind them emerges an impossible bouquet of faces, some captured in ghoulish grimaces, some chalky and shadowed against the evening light. Three figures crouch near the base of the many faces; they are watchful and alert. In the back, streetlights gleam red like warnings and four shadows emerge from distant fog reaching ever so closer. I am unsure if a film or book might be a direct inspiration for this piece, but the central old man, supported by the woman and man, does bring to mind Cormac McCarthy’s 2022 book The Passenger about a man haunted by grief and impossible love who stumbles upon the mystery of a missing person.
McCarthy’s central character is a salvage diver who discovers a sunken wreck off the coast of Mississippi, in which all passengers have died, trapped inside the plane, except for a mysterious, missing tenth passenger. It’s never determined who this missing person could be and why they were recorded in the flight manifest. Were they removed by agents before the flight took off, or did they somehow escape the plane? Does it matter? I don’t think it does, but it’s these questions, these hauntings, these impossibilities, that I see when I look in the old man’s woozy, off-kilter face, for these are the ways in which life marks us all. This is a man weighed down, heavy with ghosts, with wanting, painted with the shadows of things that are no longer here.
Jill Mulleady. Maldoror, 2025. Private Collection. © Jill Mulleady. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur.
Maldoror (2025) is another of Mulleady’s paintings that evokes a literary connection. The painting itself features a figure in blue, maybe a boy, lying upon the floor. Behind and over him, stand a crowd of white-faced figures. Some seem to have rouged cheeks and others are in capes. Those closest to the boy are enticed by the aura of psychedelic fire emanating from his body. Upon the fire, two smaller figures dance as if they’re phantoms, skeletons, maybe even figments of a dream. Les Chants de Maldoror is a 19th-century novel-length prose poem written by the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse. The poem concerns itself with Maldoror as narrator, character, unreliable all-seeing eye, and a figure of evil whose presence permeates the poem’s action. Each of the piece’s chapters, its “songs,” seem unconnected to one another. The action is surreal. Much is said upon the thin line between human and animal: there’s a worm that compels a man to kill and a shark which becomes a human’s lover.
Now I don’t think that Maldoror is meant to be a one-to-one interpretation of its source text. I don’t believe the unconscious boy in blue is Maldoror or one of the poem’s main characters. Rather, I see the painting as Mulleady’s interpretation of the thin lines between author and reader, a creation and its creator. For couldn’t the skeletons dancing upon the blue boy’s holy fire be ideas, a book that’s not yet written, a poem not yet spoken? Then the crowd of faces above the boy are the ravenous audience, the people who want both the boy and his creations. Maybe, too, the crowd is the text itself, a creation’s uncanny ability to take, to extract from its creator, the demands of art personified.
Jill Mulleady. Jeanne d’Arc, 2023. © Jill Mulleady. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur.
It’s difficult to ascribe any solid, firm, unwavering meaning to Mulleady’s paintings for indeterminacy lies at the heart of her practice —we see what we want to see. While Mulleady does nod to the capaciousness of subjectivity through her non-linear storytelling and dream logic, indeterminacy is the wrong word here, for she is an artist certain in her choices. Better said, Mulleady is committed to experimentation. When I say experiments, Mulleady not only experiments with her materials but she reimagines and reinterprets painting’s own histories: see her still life of apples (Still Life with Red & Green Apples, 2026), her portraiture (Saint Jerome (2026) and Jeanne d’Arc (2023), and her take on the Renaissance mural, all the hallmarks of a mythological scene transported to a seemingly American gun shop (Gunshop, 2025).
Jill Mulleady. Gunshop, 2025. Ringier Collection, Switzerland. © Jill Mulleady. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur.
I originally thought of Lynch’s phrase, my titular “woman in trouble,” when viewing Mulleady’s show because not all passengers are women in trouble, but all women in trouble are passengers. I think of Barbara Loden’s film Wanda (1970), the titular being swept away by each of the men she’s unlucky enough to encounter, sitting silent, helpless, yet preternaturally watchful in the backseat of their cars. I think of Lynch’s Nikki, of Mulleady’s Gena and her Joan at the stake (this is the moment she became a passenger).
To be a passenger means to watch the story unfold before you. You’re a reader, a sentry, the person who impossibly, improbably survives to see what happens next. Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, is one of the first recorded passengers. She’s the first to see Jesus resurrected, the first to see a miracle, an impossibility made flesh. I can’t then help but equate the figure of Mulleady’s passenger to how femmes, cis, and trans women have long moved through the world. While gender isn’t something that Mulleady explicitly ascribed to her show, I don’t think she’d discourage her work from being viewed through this lens, either. For under the auspices of big “S” Surrealist dream-logic, the feminine is a walking, waking secret and Mulleady’s paintings—her work to show why we want what we want—crack such secrets wide open.