Ask Edward Mills, an American multimedia artist who lives in Paris, if his artistry has an out-of-the-box way of thinking, and he may reply that these days, it’s out of a cube.
“The Cube” is the centerpiece of Mills’ U.S. exhibition debut “The Past Will Fail You” at 836M gallery in San Francisco this month. The sculpture is composed of 1,000 handmade wooden blocks that, starting Aug. 9, will morph daily into new forms depending on who is interacting with it—Mills and the public—and become an original artwork at the conclusion of Mills’ residency.
Mills, pleased with the gallery’s engaging approach, says, “What I really love about what they are trying to do with the different artists they invite is to bring people into the process, because I find that my work is more than just the result of the process—the process is also the art—for me there’s something performative about it.”
Mills characterizes his artistic style as graphic, linear-based, less figurative, more surrealistic, with a spontaneous “semi-automatic method.” Aside from “The Cube,” nowadays he creates black-and-white drawings, which also will be on view at the gallery.
Working under 836M’s Beyond Frontiers residency program, which emphasizes how artists create, Mill says, “I’m really excited about showing how that process works for me, what it looks like, what it can do to you as something you view. [And] as a viewer, what does it look like, what does it feel like to watch someone doing these repetitive motions or these other things that make art.”
Mills, who opens the exhibition with a 6:30 p.m. Aug. 8 reception, is offering the public two opportunities to participate. One invites people to sign up for the chance to see what it feels like to use the sculpture’s blocks. The other is a more involved experience.
“The other opportunity is not just to use the sculpture in the form of play that I designed it for, but to actually engage with it the way that I intended fully, to see what someone else would do in my shoes with the sculpture, if they want,” Mills says. “There’s no forcing, but it’s on offer.”
Mills, 46, a woodworker as well as sculptor and painter who moved to France from the northeastern U.S. two decades ago, says inspiration for “The Cube” originated from a chair he was making at his first studio in Paris. During a test, he cut the square legs into cubes, and, encouraged by a close friend who said the cubes were “awesome,” decided to make thousands.
Those numerous cubes turned into something much larger, says Mills, who cites Hieronymus Bosch, Vincent van Gogh and Canadian multimedia artist Jeremy Shaw as his influences.
“In a series of different moments in my life, from deciding to make a thousand cubes, then realizing what they all meant, then reevaluating the meaning, and then it evolved into something else. And so, at this point, where I know it is now, is what I am presenting in San Francisco, and I hope it will continue to evolve past that.”
At 836M, the sculpture will be broken and rebuilt every night, leaving a new version that’s visible every morning through the gallery window. The process will continue until the end of Mills’ residency, when the pieces will be reassembled into their original form and shipped back to France.
“Because it’s thousands of different pieces, every time you build it you can build something different,” Mills says. “Whoever is manipulating it, they can try to build, say, a cityscape, a keystone, five different towers, a single wall, whatever they want with it.”
The name “The Past Will Fail You” is derived from Mills’ interest in exploring the destruction of the self as a necessary part of growth and self-realization.
“The sculpture is a means to always to see the opportunity of something broken as the new beginning that it is, Mills says. “Starting in a different place each time, build something new, don’t build the same thing that you had before. You have this mess, now build something else with it.”
Edward Mills’ “The Past Will Fail You” runs Aug. 8-22 at 836M, 836 Montgomery St., San Francisco. To reserve a spot for the free opening or closing events (6:30 p.m. Aug. 8 and Aug. 22) or book a time slot to build and smash “The Cube,” visit 836m.org.
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