Millie Wilson: Looks Bad

September 18 – October 30, 2011

For this exhibition Wilson will display a new series of light box transparencies.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In my work I have used the frame of the museum to propose a secret history of modernity informed by queer sexuality, femininity, race and class. I have used humor, parody and homage to point to stereotypes of difference. I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicizing of the artist as subject and citizen.

In Looks Bad, what I attempt to make visible is suggested through the telling details of vernacular photographs. They are selected from a large archive of found images, and with each new grouping I allow for a number of possible readings to arise, ranging from formal qualities, gestures, and normative relations, to manufactured objects, gender, anomalies and “ghosts.”

I think of my installations as unfinished inventories of fragments: objects, photographs and other inventions; as improvisational sites where the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge.

Millie Wilson has exhibited her work internationally and is Regular Faculty in the Program in Art, School of Art, California Institute of the Arts. Select exhibition venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Matthew Marks Gallery, New Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She has received numerous grants including the NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a City of Los Angeles Artists Grant.

PUBLICATION

Exhibition catalogue