Joetta Maue

I am feeling a little collapsed, tired, maybe even dark today. Also feeling quiet, contemplative, and open.


So the work of Rodney McMillan is speaking to me.


For some reason or another more minimal and sculptural work has been drawing me in. It seems a little bit like I can get lost in it.


Since my own work is so much about my story maybe sometime I need to not hear another artists story but instead just hear with my eyes?


From his 2008 Whitney Biennial profile:

Reflecting his diverse interest in the boundaries demarcating class, economic status, culture, and their relationship to the physicality of the human body, Rodney McMillian’s mixed-genre practice both incorporates and challenges the notion of art as social and historical critique. Aesthetically, McMillian pits light against dark, while his materials— a palette of primarily black, dark blue, and gray paint on raw, unprimed canvas—eloquently symbolize the often opposing cultural forces underlying the delineations he studies. The battered and discarded mattresses, filing cabinets, wood paneling, chairs, bookshelves, and other post consumer objects that his installations present elicit comparisons of domesticity, education, and race. Recently his sculptures have begun to formally mimic his un-stretched paintings, which drape loosely in gallery corners, trail sewn appendages, or unravel onto the floor to highlight their textile nature. The three dimensional quality of McMillian’s paintings recalls Eva Hesse’s work, though their quick, linear brushstrokes evoke the subliminal emotive release inherent to Abstract Expressionism. Read in its entirety here.

Any way see more of Rodney's work here.