Wardell Milan, A young man in curlers at home on west 20th street, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Courtesy of Raymond Learsy Collection. Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Courtesy of private collection, New York. Man with an Indian headdress, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Private collection, courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York. Woman with a fur coat on the street, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Courtesy of Kathleen Madden and Paul Frantz.
Wardell Milan, A young man in curlers at home on west 20th street, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Courtesy of Raymond Learsy Collection. Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Courtesy of private collection, New York. Man with an Indian headdress, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Private collection, courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York. Woman with a fur coat on the street, N.Y.C., 2017. Cut-and-pasted printed paper. Courtesy of Kathleen Madden and Paul Frantz.
Wardell Milan
The paradoxical state of dualisms or twoness, and the philosophical themes of the Absurdists are at the core of my intellectual and artistic curiosities. Charles Baudelaire meditated on the concept of twoness—oscillating between two simultaneous inclinations: one towards the grace of God, the other a primal descent towards Satan—terming this duality the "tragedy of man". Within my examinations of the idea of twoness, desire, mourning, identity, and idiosyncratic obsessions and love interact in an ambivalent way, but also in a way that registers the complexities of the individual, and the absurdity of life's banal situations.
My work pivots between the illusionistic possibilities of photography and the mutability of drawing and collage. In my photographic work, hand-constructed tabletop dioramas, illustrating fantastic landscapes and alternative worlds, are a grand mixture of history, as a set of stories and images— the kinds we read in textbooks and recount in museums; autobiography and mythology collapsed into each other. I’m creating images that are psychologically charged and imagistic. Informed by the refusal of temporality, my works on paper rely on incompletion and fragmentation. Evacuating time, culture, and the body from linear logic, these ideas and drawings become displaced and refigured in order to discover a truer, more complicated, and impossible riddled story about ourselves as individuals; and a foray for us into self-realization, self-discovery, and perhaps a kind of sociocultural redemption.
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Wardell Milan (b. 1977, Knoxville, TN) earned an MFA in Photography from Yale University (2004), and a BFA in Photography and Painting from the University of Tennessee (2001). He has exhibited his work extensively, including recent solo exhibitions at Park Avenue Armory, NY (2018); Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ (2017); David Nolan Gallery, NY (2015); and recent group exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters, NY (2018); Crystal Bridges Museum of Contemporary Art, Arkansas (2018); The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2015); and MoMA PS1, NY (2015). He has completed residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017); the Lower East Side Printshop (2010-11); The Studio Museum in Harlem (2007); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2003). His work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. He is based in Sunnyside, Queens.
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