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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.




Bush (Burner with Fossils), 2019, styrofoam, acrylic, ink, photographs, epoxy resin, 40 x 25 x 25”. Hot to the Touch (Out to Lunch) (Aft view), 2019, styrofoam, acrylic, ink, photographs, epoxy resin, 70 x 60 x 50”. Be Where (floor drawing psychopomp face), 2020–ongoing, cast concrete, pigment, gravel, aquarium Pebbles, dimensions variable. Be Where (floor drawing demon face), 2020–ongoing, cast concrete, pigment, gravel, aquarium pebbles, dimensions variable. Vessel, 2019, styrofoam, poplar, acrylic, ink, photographs, epoxy resin, duct tape, 70 x 30 x 20”. Setting (Viewfinder), 2019, gravel, aquarium gravel, acrylic, paper, 60 x 80”. Collaboration with Mack Sikora.