On View: A Modern, Tragic Portrait of the Sea
The artist Wardell Milan is exhibiting his latest multimedia works at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.
Here’s what he told me about the show’s contradictory storylines →
Milan was inspired to make “The Cruel Mediterranean Sea,” which depicts a group of people flailing in shallow waves, after listening to public-radio broadcasts about the tragic land and sea crossings that many refugees and other migrants embark on.
“Some of these stories slightly demonize these individuals,” Milan says. “People escaping their homeland in search of a sanctuary.”
In the work, are the crying woman’s arms raised in celebration or despair? Is the man below her laid out in exhaustion or has he died?
“I wanted the piece to be open-ended,” Milan says, but also intentionally opaque. “Unless you have this experience, you don’t know what these people are living through,” he says.
“The show functions like an accordion,” says Milan. Some works — such as “Divine Feminine,” a series of small charcoal and oil pastel portraits of people in his queer community — “contract,” he explains.
Others, he says, “expand.” They’re physically larger and engage with broader conversations about global conflicts, migration and systemic oppression.
The exhibition’s title, “Modern Utopia,” is a bit of a misnomer; in several of the works, the subjects are “enjoying modern [comforts] but, at the same time, they’re being confronted by all of the struggles and stresses of the time that we live in,” Milan says.
In “Bombs in Applesauce,” for instance, a group of children in a field of flowers are menaced by dronelike flying objects, and in “Lovers. Outside the World Is on Fire,” a couple’s embrace is set against a backdrop of chaos and destruction.
Milan strives to act as a witness to these contrasting facets of contemporary life, in the way of the critics and essayists he admires.
“Joan Didion, Hilton Als, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde have written about how the world affects them at a personal level or in their small community, and then they expanded [their view] to criticize and celebrate the world in its totality,” he says.
Recently, Milan has been changing the way he makes work. “I’ve been thinking about how to take out what’s not needed,” he says, “completely distilling until I get to the most important idea.”
In “Modern Utopia,” that distillation is most evident in the artist’s paintings of tulips, which are more delicate than, yet just as fragmented as, many of the narrative-driven works in the show. “They represent me,” Milan says of the flowers. “They’re stand-ins for my inner feelings.”
On View highlights works by Black artists, who have traditionally faced a disproportionately uphill battle in having their work exhibited by mainstream institutions.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the city where Fraenkel Gallery is located; it is San Francisco, not New York.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
