Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian creates sculptures, videos, and paintings, often based on found objects or elaborately constructed forms. Formally striking and emotionally charged, their poetic force is often sharpened by an engagement with personal and political themes.
For Momentum 14, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, McMillian presents new work including a large-scale painting on canvas that spans the length of a gallery wall, two videos, and sculptures made using furniture from his home.
McMillian brings an immediacy and rawness to his work that reaches out, often literally, to the viewer, with appendages sprouting from large canvases and wall pieces. Found objects, such as a stained armchair, a kitchen table and chairs, and a refrigerator with a hole punched through the freezer door, speak eloquently to a sense of both abjection and loss. They are relics of former occupants, imbued with their physicality.
In these powerful works, themes of race, class, and identity are subtly woven into a formal language that mines personal and cultural history as it looks squarely at our present condition.