Colleen Mullins

Pictures of the Floating World

January 8 - February 26, 2010

These photographs were taken over a six year period traveling one to four times a year on a six-star luxury cruise line. The project is one that examines a private world, far beyond the first class curtain on an airplane. To me, the work taken on whole, represents an exploration of my mother’s unrealized hopes to be a part of society’s elite, and her hopes that she could push me there in her stead. She passed away in 2006 from a pulmonary embolism. Outside her several cruises a year, she spent most of her time secluded in her apartment in San Francisco, a far cry from the persona she’d developed over her years of cruising.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Colleen Mullins is an active photographer and book artist. She was awarded an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from San Francisco State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally including at the Houston Center for Photography, University of the Arts (Philadelphia,) and the Minnetonka Center for the Arts. Her work is held in several public collections including the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL and the Global Collection of Photography at the Weeks Gallery, Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, NY. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant to continue work on her project, Elysium that examines the urban forest of New Orleans, and its new and delicate relationship with its human neighbors in the still choppy wake of Hurricane Katrina. https://colleenmullins.net/home.html