Andrew Millner: Texts

Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose: The Poetry of Repetition

8 November 2011 in

By Eileen G’Sell

A Rorschach inkblot. A toxic cloud. A massive chandelier dripping thick magenta. When we look at Andrew Millner’s latest project, its figurative language stirs and distorts. Fractal-like florals pile on canvas; foreground and background conflate, compress. A pattern of roses shifts to a semblance more stark, foreign, looming. What was utterly two dimensions in the artist’s earlier work—digitized drawings of plants and trees presented in mindbendingly meticulous detail—become tactile here in dense acrylic. Around each lustrous conundrum of paint, naked canvas quietly spreads. Technically, these paintings resemble street graffiti as much as baroque wallhangings. They are majestic yet sprawling, deep while delicate, robust even though a little bit sad.

The eye struggles to make sense of it all. Is it pretty or disquieting? Flat or fantastic? But dichotomy serves to bolster the work, intensifying affect. Using drawings of rosebushes previously composed with a digital pen and graphics tablet, the artist projects the image onto raw linen canvas. He then carefully squeezes paint over the slender, winding lines, allowing it to pool at their intersections. What results can appear static from a distance, but up close calls attention to the vagaries of chance. For as much as the artist controls the paint, gravity controls the distance it falls. But unlike the iconic drips that come from the “action painting” of the mid-20th century, Millner’s fall with precision. They are nearly parallel, yet eerily not, as each one plummets down by itself. Some drips bleed to the edge of the canvas, while others hover a few inches above. Some resemble Christmas tinsel hanging from a lampshade; others drop like earrings from the ends of stems.

Gertrude Stein famously claimed “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily.” To Stein, whose creative and theoretical work anticipated postmodernism, language referenced itself as much as it did the tangible universe. A “rose” in a poem written during the modernist era (and, arguably, even more so today) reminds one not just of the bloom, but of the rich history of verse in which the proud flower was valorized.

So, too, do Millner’s voluptuous figures reference multiple layers of information—mimetic and imagined, digital and “real”—to which we cannot have full access. Like Stein, he engages the law of identity, “A is A,” but Millner moves away from the rhetoric of thricefold repetition (“is a rose is a rose is a rose”) in his art-making process. His depicted roses do not chiefly reference a type of familiar flower, or even the digital photograph taken of the flower as the artist’s initial step. Millner’s “rose,” not unlike Stein’s, means more for what it could be than for what it surely is. What our eyes struggle to make sense of gains its own distinctive lyricism— an exercise in repetition that blurs the divide between technology, chance, and the artist’s hand.

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and Lecturer of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where she serves as publications editor for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Riverfront Times Review - November 3, 2011

8 November 2011 in Reviews

Review by Jessica Baran

Andrew Millner: Rose is a rose is a rose
Starting with a digital drawing pad and a stylus, St. Louis-based Millner drafts meticulous renderings of leaves and other botanical subjects, then projects the drawings onto stretched raw linen and traces the lines with thick beads of paint, often straight from the tube. Millner’s earlier work held fast to its source (down to every last serration and vein on a single leaf), but Rose finds him radically essentializing and abstracting the renderings in transferring them to canvas. Titled after the single hue in which it is painted — White Rose, Red Rose, Crimson Rose, etc. — each canvas exists somewhere between absolute adhesion to its muse (the rosebush) and the capacity to lose that grip entirely. Some sustain a crisp and conventional line quality, while others are set loose to drip to excess. The result is as texturally rich as a piece of lace but with an overarching component of frenetic abandon — as though something has literally unraveled on the canvas. Every painting’s tangle of sanguine thread embodies the rift that, we all imagine, separates the “real” from the wholly impressionistic. Again and again the rosebush returns, each time pitting a former conception of self against a startlingly new one. Through December 23 at William Shearburn Gallery, 4735 McPherson Avenue; 314-367-8020 or www.shearburngallery.com. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat.

2 September 2010 in Articles

What is “nature?” What is “natural?” These questions are increasingly difficult to answer as the borders of the natural and artificial continue to blur. As the sphere of human influence grows larger, questions about our relationship to the “natural” and our place in it prove ever more pressing.

For the past three years, I have been “collecting” trees and plants by drawing their contours directly into the computer. I’ve notated the simple outlines of leaves, branches, and limbs, by tracing their outlines with an electronic pen and tablet.

The digital medium describes all things equally; the near and the far, the large and the small, without the prejudice inherent in our familiar acts of looking. The idiosyncrasies of my hand trace over photographs taken from multiple points of view. Through the process of zooming in and out, the drawings capture information outside the experience of the human eye or camera. The closer one gets to these works, the more one can see. It is a pure act of drawing, evoking a mental map of the natural world.

The composite effect is a dizzying web of information. Unfettered by any physical constraints, the drawings can extend over months, or even years, without any set scale or date of completion.

How changes in technology change our relationship with the natural world is germane to my artistic explorations. Advents in technology have always had a profound impact on art practice, and change how artists mediate their environment. In my art practice, these novel drawing tools facilitate greater intimacy and prolonged time for investigation, but also suggest evidence of our estrangement from the natural.

Exposure 11

13 August 2008 in Reviews

As August rolls on, the number of artistic events dwindles. Gallery 210 director Terry Suhre takes advantage of that by scheduling his annual survey of local artists for August and September.

Hothouse- CCA/Richard Levy Gallery

21 June 2008 in Articles

I haven’t written an artist statement per se, but thought I could lay out a description of my thoughts, processes and plans for the upcoming shows this summer…