NICK MILLEN

 

 

Current

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Photos: Astrid Mulder

 

These artworks aspire towards a kind of transhistorical mirage; a resting place, or meeting point for material histories in image making. Following a process of tradition and intuition, the surface encompasses an all-in style, drawing together methods of mosaic, fresco, terrazzo, low relief sculpture, abstract painting, artisanal labour, collage, digital painting and contemporary construction. The everyday, the incidental and the reoccurring images of peripheral urbanity serve as a portal to the pertinent and personal; towards the moment of contact between ourselves and the world once we’ve thrown a spotlight on our well-constructed schemas. There is a play between the focused and the periphery; between history written, or painted and a common phenomenology of veritable experience. Architecture, painting and civil infrastructure lock together on the linen canvas – their histories irrevocably entwined in glances beyond the screen. In some distant incarnation, once the differentiation and division of our current categorisations infuse and dissipate deep in the ground; another story is able to be told. Another glorious crust to dig on. For all that is prescient, contemporary, urgent and crucial, how does it start to look in another 12 million years when a robot-pig-angel pushes a core sample of our geological moment through a geo-meat-slicer? The radical differences of the world are subsumed into one another, as the rippling circumferences of hindsight continue to change the vision of what is…now. My imaginaries across pre-human, ancient, future and contemporary modes of existence and material development have offered a chance to cut back the given world a little, to alter the entropy of what’s imaginable once the present begins to widen the scope and inclusivity of its evolving story. This is the language of mosaic to me. Mosaic acts as a collector and transmuter of discarded materials. Mosaic aligns and gives purpose to the discordant in its big picture; becoming a symbiotic organ of the formerly incommensurate.  NM

 

2023

Photo Credit: Jessica Maurer

 

 

Photo Credit: Jessica Maurer

 

 

Photo Credit: Jessica Maurer

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

Photo Credit: Jessica Maurer

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

Photo Credit: Jessica Maurer

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Between mosaics and digital images, recurring currents persist. The pixel, the tesserae, the point; the singular element that works to form the whole combines with its kin in resolution. Whole in itself, each varied element takes on a parallel context within its wider image. This is a mode of downward abstraction. Like getting up close with a billboard advertisement, the particles appear ever more alien from the total image they help to form.

Within and without ever burgeoning technologies, fundamental modalities possess new hardware like smoky liquid. In these artworks, the intersections of varying resolution styles highlight persistent modes of image creation across time.

Slim densities of concrete, lime, paint and paper images lock against mosaic structures on linen. Using sanders, the layers of material are excavated and enmeshed, forming a sculpted surface. The surface takes on an ontological fusion. Stripped back pixelated prints tarry alongside layers of terrazzo style concrete paint. The confluence of ancient, contemporary, artistic and labour methods expresses itself as an overlapping, iconoclastic swell – a kind of city ecology.

 

 

2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Astrid Mulder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Utilising contemporary construction materials, I draw together renaissance methodologies to conflate material histories of labour and artistic production. The works blur distinctions between figure and ground, between the focused and the periphery, between utilitarianism and sheer poetics.

My concern is with merging the history of art with the back drop of the city itself – infusing the conscious experience of viewing art, architectural patinas and advertising material with the hazily unconscious, liminal dream space of footpaths, traffic islands and public infrastructure. The works register a confluence between shared, historicised narratives of conscious propagation and the internalised psychic imaginaries that leave quiet, physical traces within city blocks.

 

 

 

 

2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Expressing material transitions between liquid and solid states, the work combines seemingly disparate elements into integrated wholes.

Paint, waste, plastics, pigments, dust, stones, sand, dye and earth are mixed with concrete and cast into solid forms. These forms/sculptures become the subject and primary material for installations and paintings. For the paintings, the forms and are broken up and ground down into hand-dyed canvases.

 

 

 

 

2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The paintings and sculptures build a dialogue between transhistorical technologies, transitional earth cycles and the contemporary challenge to integrate problematic materials into functional networks.

 

 

 

 

Earlier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contact Nick Millen

enquiries@nickmillen.com

instagram: @nrmillen