jeff mcmillan – the possibility of an island

 

2 july – 23 august 2009

 

Jeff McMillan in conversation with Louisa Buck: Wednesday 15 July at 6.30 at Peer

Exhibition opening times:

Wednesday to Saturday noon to 6pm
Admission free.

 

 

One work dominates Jeff McMillan’s installation at Peer. A wall construction made up of nearly two hundred individually painted landscape scenes presented in a carefully ordered mass appear to migrate across two of the three gallery walls, as if attempting to envelope the space. The work is made entirely from paint-by-numbers paintings popular in North America in the 50s and 60s and acquired by McMillan over the last 15 years from thrift stores, or more recently on eBay.

 

The title of the exhibition, The Possibility of an Island, is also the title of this work, and suggests both a self-contained autonomy and a sense of isolation. Many of the landscapes in these pictures are similar or repeated, many overlap, some are upside-down; the process of their meticulous arrangement reveals McMillan’s interest in and enjoyment of the formal aspects of line and colour, pattern and dislocation. Gradually, however, one notices that he has been careful to edit out references to human or animal presence in the landscape; the slavishly coloured-in cabin nestling in the woods, the picturesque rickety fence, the enchanting deer have almost all been obscured by other paintings, leaving an unadulterated, pre-lapserian view of the world. McMillan presents a picture of unsettling restfulness that is almost too quiet. This work can also be considered in the context of the tradition of American landscape painting and notions of the romantic sublime. Implicit in McMillan’s process of making is the suggestion of its continued evolution – this vast, untouched wilderness is potentially endless.

 

In the other, smaller work in this exhibition McMillan again takes a ‘found’ painting as his starting point, but these are singular pieces, one-off amateur paintings on canvas rather than a mass-produced DIY version. Through a process of pushing the canvas into a solid colour of paint, the artist literally and pictorially produces a new picture plane while obscuring some or even all of the original image. Again, notions of the sublime can apply, but this time the reference is closer to the tradition of the monochrome and colour field painting than to the aspirational majesty of the American landscape. In both groups of works McMillan begins with an act of appropriation, then via a process of assembling or dipping, a complex and redemptive transformation takes place.

 

Jeff McMillan was born in the US and has lived and worked in London since 1998. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in the US and UK including the John Moores Painting Prize in Liverpool (2002, 2004, 2006), and he has recently held one-person exhibitions in Vienna and San Francisco. This is his first one-person exhibition in London.

 

Artist’s talk: Jeff McMillan in conversation with writer and broadcaster Louisa Buck on Wednesday 15 July at 6.30pm.

 

Publication: A fully illustrated 16 page booklet with an essay by Dr Richard Noble (Head of Fine Art at Goldsmiths) and an interview with Darian Leader (writer and psychoanalyst) will be available FREE to visitors to the exhibition.

 

Click here for a PDF of Jeff McMillan's interview with Darian Leader

 

More images from the exhibition at Peer

 

PRESS

Time Out review

 

Further information and press images are available by contacting Takako Jin at info@peeruk.org.

 

 

 

Peer’s gallery programme is supported by Arts Council England.

This exhibition has been supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.