Rodney McMillian

Untitled (There are veins in these lands, I)

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, Rodney McMillian uses second-hand bed sheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric. His vibrant red composition from 2013 slips and drips from its edges onto the floor, with figure and ground evoking different scales of representation—the zoomed-out, depopulated landscape created by the paint, and the human-scaled intimacy of the bedsheets.