SEATTLE, WA.- Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, South Carolina; based in Los Angeles, California) works with the social and political histories of the United States and how they define our daily lives. Using existing texts and domestic materials—such as house paint on thrifted fabrics and bedsheets, or “post-consumer objects” as he calls them—he traces both the visible and invisible forces that shape civic life, particularly for the lives of African Americans.

Inspired by the lush surroundings of the Henry, McMillian brings together sculpture, video, and painting that present an outdoor landscape overgrown with the lingering effects of physical, political, and social violence.

Across his varied media, McMillian navigates within the tension between abstraction and figuration, presence and absence. In a group of freestanding abstract sculptures, evocative ghostly forms—part taxidermy, part modernist object—suggest both prized trophy and deathly trace. Recent paintings from his ongoing landscape series act as portals: views onto skies, stars, and foliage that float between this world and the next. Together, they offer escape, but also confrontation—fantastical elsewheres.

McMillian’s videos address politics more directly as figures and landscapes rooted in the here and now. Preacher Man II (2017–2021) features a lay clergyman seated at a Southern crossroads, delivering his sermon adapted from a speech by civil rights activist Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), written during the height of the Black Power movement. In Untitled (neighbors) (2017), filmed in Austin, Texas, performers in flowing white garments stalk classical grounds and architecture with gestures that are formal, incantatory, and unexpectedly ribald—calling forth a haunting mixture of foreboding ritual and inappropriate response.

For McMillian, as for so many in the U.S., the past is never past. It is a fertilizer that feeds and cultivates the country we must tend to every day.