Regarding Violence

Petzel is pleased to present Regarding Violence, an exhibition of recent works by Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian on view from November 18, 2022 to January 7, 2023 at the gallery’s new Chelsea location at 520 W 25th Street. McMillian’s mixed-genre practice activates objects and texts from the past to locate their reverberating effects on the present. Spanning the two largest rooms, McMillian’s second exhibition at Petzel reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in teasing apart the political conditions that continue to enable systems of inequity.

Beacon: Comrades, Don't Be Fooled

In a large installation, decoy ducks scatter the floor around a taxidermized head of a deer, previously incorporated by its hunter into the post of a lamp. Invoking ethnographic museum display strategies, McMillian reconfigures these cultural artifacts to surface systems of violence and consumption that underlie contemporary relations to the American landscape. The lamp’s blinking light denaturalizes these recirculated objects with its Morse-coded warning: “Comrades, don’t be fooled!”

Vinyl Paintings

Industrial-grade black vinyl works, or sky paintings, line the walls. Though largely abstract, the wall-hangings intimate at skin, carefully stitched. On a societal level, the seams translate to the turbulent constructions of social, cultural, and economic delineations. “The abstraction is about the shock of the politics, the shock of the murder and death, the shock of the history,” says McMillian.

Specimen Sculptures

The ethnographic vernacular extends to the next room, in which McMillian mummifies in white papier-mâché organic shapes that evoke Modernist sculptures. They stand on contrasting plinths – logs, turfed grass, volcanic boulders of foam – that further situate the objects in the realm of taxidermies. Yet, by dubbing them “specimens,” McMillian at once buries the objects as dead entities on display while enlivening more critical aesthetic relations to their canonized forms.