WARDELL MILAN 1848, Venice, 2019, 2020 © Wardell Milan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and David Nolan Gallery, New York

An artist draws inspiration from many sources and uses various mediums to tangibly express what they envision in their mind’s eye. In the case of Wardell Milan, a New York-based visual artist, mixed media is the ticket—a combination of photographic elements, drawing, painting, collage, and three-dimensional dioramas.

2020 has been a year of many life changing events, one catastrophe after another; it has reminded us all that we have made much progress, but in terms of certain issues such as racism, the past and the present have been over overlapping and are still playing in a sad loop. These events have served as an influence on Milan’s latest body of work. His series Death, Wine, Revolt explores themes of over-indulgence, destruction, and revolution.

WARDELL MILAN Here the mysterious host—raised in the South, now based in the North curates a gathering of friends seeking sanctuary, 2020 © Wardell Milan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and David Nolan Gallery, New York

In the photograph, 1848, Venice, 2019, 2020, Milan uses enlargements of his own photographs of the city of Venice, setting his images in dialogue with historical sites of racist violence or political rebellion. There are a range of human figures littering the frame. Often nude, their bodies are rendered in a combination of fractured drawings and photographs, and overlaid with blue and white paint. Some groupings suggest erotic coupling or violent encounters, and many arrangements are based on photographic sources.

WARDELL MILAN2020, Los Feliz, Los Angeles, 2020 © Wardell Milan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and David Nolan Gallery, New York

Milan’s work evokes "visual narratives" that can be regarded as linear or non-linear according to how the viewer interprets each scene.

He also often appropriates photographs, and found objects in his work. In 2020, Los Feliz, Los Angeles, Milan arranges five figures in white Ku Klux Klan hoods against his own photograph of the city’s hills. The positioning of bodies is based on a found image of a Klan social gathering, and presents the white nationalists in a bland, contemporary California suburb.

WARDELL MILANWayne Hopkins, 2020 © Wardell Milan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and David Nolan Gallery, New York

In some of his smaller scale works such as, Amerika: Klansmen, Spencer and Boon, 2020, Milan creates a white-on-white cut paper collage depicting Klansmen and Untitled (Landscape, Tennessee), 2020.

Milan’s work often includes cut-out photographs from various artists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Gober, the films of Federico Fellini, bodybuilding magazines, the absurdist plays of Eugène Ionesco, and E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of the Storyville district of New Orleans.