Gabriel Mills, Uelia, 2024, oil on wood panel (diptych), 120 x 120 x 2 in. Courtesy the Artist and Micki Meng
ON VIEW
THROUGH DECEMBER 8, 2024
Oppenheimer New Media Gallery, Second Floor
NERMAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, JOHNSON COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
FREE and Open to the Public
Gabriel Mills’s paintings are, in many ways, personal responses — responses to life events, to language, to music, and to one another. Viktor Frankl famously noted that, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” Beginning with a larger idea, based on his own life experience and personal belief system, Mills simultaneously converses with the viewer while creating a dialogue within the work itself. His paintings are often paired (or grouped) together as if in conversation, one responding to the other or creating a tension which the other reflects. Taking advantage of the natural tendency for the viewer to attempt to come to terms with the presented relationship, the artist has ingeniously devised an antidote to modern society’s shortening attention span. We are forced to slow down, look carefully, and seek the meaning in the union of the arranged picture planes. Once discovered, our responses will be unique depending on our individual reference points as well as our own necessary paths for personal growth.
The physicality of Mills’s work, with its exceptionally thick layers of oil paint and its visible, broad brushstrokes, seems to belie the artist’s intention that each mark represents the ethereal — thoughtful introspection. Contradiction is intentional as the artist has stated, “I’m interested in forms and ideas that hold opposites close together. So much of life is that way.” Using one form to help illumine the other, Mills employs the act of painting as a path to clarity. According to the 13th c. mystic Rumi, “All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony. Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.” The initial visual “disharmony” presented to the viewer by the contrasting relationship between color and form in Mills’s work reminds the viewer that there is no light without darkness, no love without first letting go of fear — in essence, the journey of self-discovery. The artist states, “I’m bringing my full self to each work, to then go on an arduous journey. The destination isn’t ever a physical location; it’s an internal realization.” Aesthetic experience that touches one’s soul is not only “an affirmation of the artist’s being,” as Mills posits, but of the receptive viewer’s as well. In this way, Gabriel Mills creates the most impactful of relationships — that between the artist and his audience.
Learn more about this exhibition at nermanmuseum.org.
–Allison C. Smith, Ph.D., Professor, Art History, Chair, Art History and Humanities, Johnson County Community College
