"Untitled (ellipses) II"

May 31 - June 28

Reception: Saturday, May 31, 5 - 8 pm

In his first solo exhibition at the gallery, Rodney McMillian presents a group of works that are inter-connected by an exploration of the chasm between recorded and real-time history. 

Approaching this rather complex subject from various points of view - the domestic, the art historical, the bourgeois, the personal - McMillian's working method is a strategy of omissions in which eclipsed fragments and characters come to live more vividly than the recorded facts. 

On view in the exhibition is a painting made from an old used carpet pulled from a house in Los Angeles, together with a complete edition of Current Biography (1940's-1990's), an old discarded reading chair found on the street, and a still life painting of books.  Viewers are encouraged to purchase single pages describing their favorite historical figures, to be ripped from the volumes of "Current Biography", perpetuating and thus making visible the process of omission that the books are based on.  This process is reversed in the still life and the carpet painting which immortalize the "historification" of the individual.  A video, entitled "Untitled (audience)", showing excerpts of the audience from Michael Jackson's 2001 30th Anniversary Special, lays bare the ecstasy, awe, and wonderment many experienced, without showing the performer once.  The recording of this particular part of history opens the gap between fact and recorded fact up to an ever greater rift: that between individual and historical super figure. 

Rodney McMillian received his MFA in 2002 from the California Institute of the Arts and his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.  He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine, in 2000.  McMillian's work has been shown at Stefan Adamski Gallery in Aachen, Germany, and has been included in Veni Vidi Video at the Studio Museum Harlem, Harlem, NY, "Urban Aesthetics" at the California African American Museum, and in A Show That Will Show That A Show Is Not Only A Show at The Project, Los Angeles.  This is his first exhibition at the gallery.