Wes Mills
One of two drawings titled Memory Line reminded me of viewing Chartres’ spire. Each line in a row of 45 on the right side of the paper starts at the bottom and goes a bit more than halfway up; unevenly spaced and often broken–each is in several segments–they create a dialogue with the space around them. The lines meet a curved horizontal band of gum arabic that’s slightly darker than the pale tan paper; the gum arabic causes the paper to bend a bit, and the various folds produced give these drawings an almost sculptural three-dimensionality, taking the lines off the paper and into space. The curved band is elegant but somewhat arbitrary, seemingly a momentary stopping point rather than a real boundary. Together the broken lines, the gum arabic–which makes the paper more translucent–and the space around the shape created by the pencil lines all work to dematerialize Memory Line.
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If this piece suggests a spire, an untitled drawing (one of the two smaller works) reminded me of Chartres’ interior: one peers into what first seems darkness, an undifferentiated gray that suddenly comes alive with detail and energy. In Mills’s drawing a dark shape slightly wider at the top on a blank ground appears from a distance to be solid gray but is actually composed of many thin pencil lines, some overlapping others. The paper’s texture shows through, adding further detail, as do some tiny dark dots where graphite has accumulated. The lines are too dynamic to be random but too multifarious to resemble the ordered forms of earlier abstractionists–such as Agnes Martin, one artist Mills acknowledges admiring. Lost in his peculiar blends of line and emptiness, the eye becomes a kind of wanderer, denied any firm resting place. These drawings are in fact about surrender–of one’s attachment to objects and of overly specific modes of thinking–and in this sense perhaps are not far removed from the feeling of transcendence produced by Chartres.
One work that does have a title is Dawa, My Left Your Left (Mills believes dawa is Sanskrit for “to pass through”). Like most of these drawings, it’s on tissue-thin silk paper folded over, producing two layers and consequently a feeling of depth. Dawa, My Left Your Left seems to show a single object, a long rectangle or cylinder of many tiny pencil lines with bands of gum arabic covering each end and the middle as if binding the rest of the shape, though the “object” seems too delicate to be any solid thing: the fragile form almost seems to hover in space. The light tan gum arabic seems to be containing the energy and potential chaos of the pale gray pencil lines, though nothing here has much weight.
“As a people, when we see a neutral space we build a house on it, or if we see a neutral room we maybe add furniture. When you reach this point in your head where everything is quiet, one has a tendency to want to add to that. I hope that my drawings can be about not adding to that space but just letting it exist, acknowledging that kind of quietude.”
