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Contemporary

Joseph Mills

By: Nord Wennerstrom

November 2006

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THE BUZZ
 Joseph Mills’ third book ANARCH, featuring silk-screened images (a medium new to Mills), will be published early next year by Nazraeli Press, which also published his Inner City (2003) and The Loves of the Poets (2005).

DESCRIPTION OF WORK

Mills creates photographic images that could easily be mistaken for character studies of those
Image courtesy Hemphill Fine Arts

"The Diplomat," 2005,
original collage on found object.

comic and bizarre creatures one sees cavorting about Hieronymus Bosch’s circa-1500 “The Garden of Earthly Delights”—part human and part animal, figures made from odd combinations of limbs and bodies. His use of sepia tones heightens the works’ nostalgic aura. In reality, he’s part of the lineage of those who mine the absurd in art—a line that runs from Bosch through Commedia dell’arte and into Surrealism. Mills’ photomontages, however, transcend mere caricature and attempt to understand how we process the random and disparate experiences that daily bombard our lives. They also reflect, in a poetically exaggerated way, our own idiosyncrasies, foibles and individuality. Mills avoids complicated, grand narratives and concentrates on isolated situations. A single image can ricochet from banal, to amusing and horrific. The effect both draws us in and throws us off kilter, a duality to which we all can relate.

METHOD OF WORK

Mills creates collages using images from vintage copies of Life magazine, then photographs his creations to yield a photomontage. Collaging, Mills says, “is a salvaging operating, [where you are] taking things that are discarded and not thought of as important” and giving them new life. “It requires insight, awareness and clarity, and a reverence for chance and accident. You relinquish control in order to find the things that are a part of you. That is the crux of my method.” He lays out hundreds of cutouts and starts creating different combinations, going through permutation after permutation, until that divine moment when chance and accident produce a new and compelling image, such as “the chicken embryo on top of Carmen Miranda doing her dance.” Ironically, Mills almost rejected what has become one of his most popular images, “Untitled,” 1984.

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