03 Jul Landscape with Bed Sheet

Los Angeles based Rodney McMillian is currently featured in a fantastic show at P.S. 1 MoMA. Entitled Landsape Paintings, Mr. McMillian has created a completely unusual canvas for paintings: bedsheets. Scouring thrift shops, this painter picks up all manner of bedsheets: patterned, plain, designer, or common. Using leftover paint from construction supply stores as his medium, he turns these possessions of former owners into fantastically beautiful works of art that convey tremendous visual power through vivid color and the perfect accidents that can occur when paint is poured on a surface and the various colors begin to comingle and dry.

I was captivated by these pastoral works for both their unusual execution and the emotional reaction I experienced in viewing them. The pieces are large and expansive as the paint used goes beyond the bedsheet surface and they hang high and loosely on the walls in a drapey, voluminous fashion.

“My interest in landscapes and these materials is not only in locating them through a different historical lens, but also from a type of bodily perspective—as opposed to the shock and awe of the sublime or the godly.” Rodney McMillian

This innovative collection is worth seeing because it is so completely different from anything else and affirms the notion that, in the right hands, anything can become “art.”

Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings runs through August 29.