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30/1/2007

Joseph Mills

Cohen Amador Gallery, New York

Inner City

The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to announce “Inner City" the first solo exhibition of Joseph Mills’ distinctive photographic work in New York City. Inspired by wanderings around the marginalized streets of Washington D.C., Mills’ range of work varies from street based photography to highly skilled photomontages of esotericism. Though diverse, an inquiry into the unknowable links Mills’ methods, simultaneously offering his photographic subjects up for investigation while revealing Mills’ own artistic search and vision of reality.

Though temporally distant from the Surrealist movement of the first half of the twentieth century, Mills’ work stems from a similar fascination with chance, subjectivity and the subconscious. In true surrealist style, Mills’ street photography transforms the seemingly quotidian into a dreamscape of life’s minutiae. Unlike the somewhat ethnographic approach of many surrealist photographers, Mills’ does not distance himself from this world, but rather involves himself deeply in its mysterious and wonderful insanity. A masticated piece of gum stuck on the end of a woman’s curled index finger, the ferociously long nails of a woman passing on the street, these become the elements of a familiar, yet mysterious, dreamscape. Often photographing from oblique angles, holding the camera low by his hip, and without the assistance of the viewfinder, Mills plays with chance, limiting his control of the image, and dispelling the general notion of the photographer as omniscient spectator by situating himself in league with the viewer, as the end result is not entirely known even to him. Mills heightens the impact of his surreal world by printing this series on expired photo paper giving the finished print an almost otherworldly glow. Because of this final chance procedure, each print is different and unique and a further testament to Mills’ own subservience to the process.

The related photomontage work appears similarly surreal, but the images testify to such amazingly seamless control of the montage practice that they tend to baffle and astound the eye. With no digital manipulation, Mills deconstructs and reassembles photo fragments into haunting imagery. This brand of masterful assemblage is indicative of the legendary 19th century photographer Henry Peach Robinson, the skill and attention devoted to each individual work also quite comparable to that of Berlin Dadaist, John Heartfield. Quite distant from visible reality, the imagery bespeaks Mills’ underlying view of the hyperbole of modern life. For both these series of works Mills completes the creative process by painting a layer of varnish onto the image’s surface. This is both a symbolic and literal act of completion somewhat indicative of painting and ultimately emphasizes the object hood and materiality of Mills’ artwork, infusing each print with an ethos that extends beyond our traditional notion of photography. The glossy sheen of the varnish closes and completes Mills’ creative exegesis.

Joseph Mills has exhibited widely across the United States including a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. He is included in numerous collections including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the National Museum of American Art in Washington DC and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He will be one of three solo artists featured at the Rencontres Arles in 2007 and has twice won the Virginia Museum Professional Fellowship Grant.

Opening Reception: Wednesday January 31, 6-8 PM

The Cohen Amador Gallery
Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street (6th floor) - New York
Hours: 11 to 6 Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment

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