ART-PRESENTATION: Rodney McMillian-Landscape Paintings
Rodney McMillian’s work resists adherence to a single medium, performance, video, installation, sculpture, and painting are all used to tackle issues of race, gender, and power within social history and culture. His works evoke a melancholy past of bygone glory days as he depicts the emotional void. Still, there’s often a socio-political edge to his works, as they often touch upon important events and people who are sometimes omitted from conventional historical records.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA PS1 Archive
The exhibition “Landscape Paintings”, with works by Rodney McMillian, is comprised of a suite of 12 paintings on bed sheets and an untitled video from 2005. Sourced from thrift stores, the sheets that McMillian uses often bear price tags or traces of former owners, and their size alludes to the intimate encounter of bodies in bed. The found bedding is transformed by the artist into works that engage the history of landscape painting. Using leftover paint from construction supply stores, McMillian responds to the absence of bodies in the history of landscape representation, his pours and splatters evoke what he describes as an “Abject history of turmoil or the spillage of blood” that is often missing from the pastoral tradition. “The exhibition at MoMA PS1 includes paintings on bedsheets, which offer a different way of looking at American landscape paintings. Paintings by Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole are all so aspirational, colonialist. My paintings are about the real in the sense that they are actual surfaces where we sleep, make love, relax, read books, nurse children, live life, and sometimes die. There’s a visceral quality to the work, a suggestion of body parts, but there are also allusions to space, the cosmos. I view these paintings as the landscapes not depicted within Bill Traylor’s work”. Provoking questions about class and identity, as well as gender and sexuality, McMillian’s works also suggest relationships between inner and outer space. While evoking the body’s interior and the public landscape, his paintings at times also suggest the expansive space of the cosmos. Science fiction serves as a touchstone for McMillian, who finds in it an analogy for history; both often reveal more about the present than the worlds of the past or future they seek to conjure. McMillian’s landscapes are similarly complex and impure spaces
Info: Curator: Heidi Zuckerman & Peter Eleey, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, Duration: 3/4-29/8/16, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 12:00-18:00, http://momaps1.org
