EXHIBITIONS
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Adia Millett
Portraits of an Escape
FEBRUARY 23–MARCH 24, 2012
OPENING: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 6-8PM
Mixed Greens is pleased to present Adia Millett’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Portraits of An Escape will consist of works on paper, sculpture, and installation.Over the past decade, Millett has built miniature, house-like structures. The exteriors mimicked a variety of architectural styles and the interiors were, in most cases, surreal single rooms without human inhabitants. The viewer bent down and peered in through the windows to view dreamlike vignettes. Photographs of these interior scenes often accompanied the sculptures and provided additional access to the miniature spaces. For the last few years, Millett has focused on expanding the surreal interiors to exist on a human scale—installations to be inhabited.
In Portraits of an Escape, we once again encounter installation and sculpture. In addition, Millett introduces a series of two-dimensional works with a focus on exteriors. Through collage, Millett directly references previous bodies of work by using the photographs of earlier sculptural interiors to create newly imagined facades. Her former structures are literally turned inside out. Through drawing, once-static buildings are depicted as hybrid houseboat structures, indicating transience, restlessness, and a departure from fixed references. While Millett has referred to escape and movement in previous pieces, this body of work is literally depicted as floating—untethered and morphing into something entirely new.
Every piece in this exhibition is a portrait. Based on actual figures in Millett’s life—real and fictional, dead and alive—the structures are personified to convey dimension and complexity whether they are rendered in ink, collaged photographs, or wood. Textures, lines, layers, missing doors, and odd angles push the structures from the familiar into a make-believe space where physical and psychological perspectives are distorted. The architectural styles range from colonial to Japanese Modern to brick townhouses to straw huts, but rarely is the reference homogeneous. Instead, the styles collide, creating perplexing, yet confident facades.
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WINDOW INSTALLATION
Meghan LeBorious
Window Installation: Emptiness & Its Implications
JANUARY 12–MARCH 24, 2012
OPENING: THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 6-8PM
Mixed Greens is thrilled to begin 2012 with a window project by Meghan LeBorious. The windows will sparkle with an installation synthesizing drawing and sculpture to create a dynamic web of light.LeBorious is known for works in sound, video, sculpture, installation, and drawing. She often draws on the history of Western anatomical representation to examine beliefs about body and identity. In recent and ongoing work, she uses scars, breath, blood, and salt to talk about the fragility and strength of the human body and psyche. Personal narratives and interactions with friends and acquaintances often inspire the pieces; and universal themes emerge.
In Emptiness & Its Implications, LeBorious connects the three windows with an abstracted drawing of the circulatory system, including heart, veins, and arteries. The drawing is rendered using thousands of painstakingly cut holes, allowing for light to shine through the black paper. Each hole is then backed with a chandelier crystal, producing the effect of a glimmering drawing that refracts, flickers, and shifts as the viewer walks past. What began as a biological drawing can also be read as a magical apparition relating to fireworks or to the afterimage left by a swirling, romantic gesture.
Blood is a familiar symbol that inspires dozens of associations ranging from trauma and vulnerability to family and love. LeBorious contemplates these and other co-arising relationships to thwart fixed meaning. The resulting delicate, celestial drawing maps a complex system of connections. It is at once aesthetically dense and conceptually layered. In this piece, she celebrates the fine line between fragility and strength through her subject and her materials.
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