Painting

Julian MacMillan



Art is leisure which is really labor, labor which is pleasure, knowledge which is actually joy and is not knowledge; is un-knowledge. My practice is a process of learning through play and production. I am curious about the sacred and the profane. My work is physical and pictorial. I move freely between drawing, photography, printmaking and sculptural techniques to complicate the distinctions between objects and images. I am attracted to the highly graphic for its relationality to writing, which I think belies its emphasis and clarity. I make work which inhabits multiple temporalities; which locates its sentience in things long forgotten or possibilities yet to be discovered; which renders the contemporary and its preoccupations strange. I want to work at the scale of my own body. I want viewers to be aware of their bodies as they encounter my work. I have a twin brother. From this strange state of affairs, new, relational visualities can materialize. I am not concerned with what is real. Somebody show me this real thing.