Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/691761
these narratives through videos and performances that use a cast of recurring characters to recontextualize everything from lyrics by Erykah Badu or the Rolling Stones and the misadventures of A.A. Milne's Eeyore to Sun Ra's Afrofuturist treatises on death and freedom and Lee Atwater's damning admission of the Republican strategy for veiling racial discrimination. These films play a central role in the ICA Philadelphia's "Rodney McMillian: The Black Show." The exhibition's title is drawn somewhat loosely from a book jacket blurb on Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye": "It's not only a black story—it's a very dark one." Originating at the Aspen Art Museum before traveling to MoMA PS1, "Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings" might be the most quietly revolutionary of the three exhibitions. The show focuses on the artist's body of semi-abstract compositions, which smear leftover house paint across secondhand bedsheets picked up at thrift stores. The result is far from a traditional landscape. In a conversation with Aspen Art Museum curator Heidi Zuckerman, the artist explained his rationale: "When I'm making these pieces, I'm thinking about the landscapes that I've encountered here in America—they are complex sites. They aren't pastoral—I can't visit a national park and be awed by the beauty of it. Not because I don't see it, but because it's a space deliberately constructed for that moment of awe." What McMillian's after instead is laying out a vocabulary of that sense of awe, mapping the "language of being tongue-tied, emotional and expressing pathos," as he notes in another essay of his. By taking this unconventional approach to the genre, MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey reasons, the artist "injects a kind of otherness into familiar appearances and histories, as a way of reminding people that there are other things lurking behind the accepted veneers of these objects and images." In other words, the artist is offering us a portal to escape into an alternative present; it is up to us to be receptive. Clockwise from above left: Succulent, 2010, from "The Black Show" at ICA Philadelphia; Untitled (carpet), 2011; Untitled (chair), 2009. "The artist injects a kind of otherness into familiar appearances and histories." —Peter Eleey COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SUSANNE VELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS. culturedmag.com 155