Rodney McMillian
MoMA PS1, New York, The Studio Museum, Harlem, and ICA Philadelphia
Department of Art Associate Professor Rodney McMillian has three solo exhibitions currently on view across the United States. Frieze.com examines the through-lines.
"In three concurrent museum shows that feature more than a decade’s worth of painting, textile, sculpture and video work, Rodney McMillian examines what happens between the sheets; in that intimate space where the sexual, potentially violent co-mingling of bodies reveals the deeper parts of the human psyche and our broader social fabric.
For ‘Landscape Paintings’ at MoMA PS1, McMillian has used bedsheets to frame the body as a kind of landscape. The marbleized red and purple paint layered atop the sheets’ surfaces could depict aerial views of muddy river deltas, bright with algal blooms, or the topography of scar tissue. Sticky globs of latex house paint pile up on these makeshift canvases like shed harlequin costumes, and in some works – such as Site #3: stumps in plain sight (2008-14) – they take on unnervingly human profiles. Many of their names make these allusions plain: fleshy pink paint extrudes from the surface of Untitled (tongue) (2014), lapping the gallery floor. The black lips of a Mouth: and the galaxy within (2012-15), speckled with bright colours, cast the body as a universe of spoken language or a constellation of physical pleasure. Sweat, blood, cum, tears: sheets claim the fluids that affirm our biological humanity. Here they pulse in dozens of exuberant hues, like the joyous secretions of a waking dream.
McMillian’s ‘Landscape Paintings’ mark a preoccupation that has long defined his career. An iconic textile piece opens ‘The Black Show’ at ICA Philadelphia: the glistening black vinyl surface of Untitled (target) (2012), visibly stitched with white string, greets viewers with its gaping maw not unlike a Lee Bontecou sculpture. A star of flayed fabric radiates from this orifice like flesh flapping at a wound. Black vinyl’s appeal is multivalent: it is cheap yet glossy, both nightclub décor and sexual fetish wear. McMillian provokes with abstraction, using bodily materials to evoke the violent and erotic charge of our own skins."— Evan Moffitt, June 23, 2016
Read the full article at the Frieze website.