“Informed by the refusal of temporality, my works on paper rely on the principles of incompletion and fragmentation. Evacuating time, culture, and the body from linear logic, these ideas and drawings become displaced and refigured in order to discover a truer, more complicated, and impossible riddled story about ourselves as individuals; and a foray for us, into self-realization, self-discovery, and perhaps a kind of socio-cultural redemption.”
—Wardell Milan
The most monumental example of his work to appear at auction, Wardell Milan’s The Age of Blossoms, 2016, features overlapping figures lounging in a bucolic landscape. Rosy-hued petals and verdant leaves bloom across the composition, interjected by monochromatic bodies shaped by graphite and charcoal. Undulating between detailed shading and blank expanses, the viewer feels as if each body is being constructed before our eyes.
The Age of Blossoms is part of a series of idyllic landscapes employing a diverse range of media, executed by Milan between 2015 and 2016. Works in this series were featured in The Charming Hour, the artist’s first solo exhibition at David Nolan Gallery in New York, in 2015. A similar example to the present work, Below the calm sky an orchestra of trees and flowers, 2015, was exhibited in The Beyond: Georgie O'Keeffe and Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2018, a visual testament to the artist’s indebtedness to O’Keeffe’s legacy of luscious flowers and feminine forms.
Milan’s characteristic multimedia practice is built upon his conceptual foundation in photography, having received an MFA in photography from Yale University in 2004. Drawing on these experiences, Milan simultaneously engages techniques of photography, drawing, collage and painting to achieve densely layered compositions. Employing mixed media collage in The Age of Blossoms, Milan explores how multiplicity is physically embodied. As a queer Black man, this fluidity of identity is deeply personal to the artist: as critic John Yau writes of Milan’s practice, “the disparity of materials and processes is echoed in the subject matter, which touches upon identity as a layered amalgamation created out of different parts or references. If — as has often been said — identity is a construction, Milan’s process mirrors its fabrication as an act of the imagination." In his imagined assemblage landscapes, Milan’s complex bodies move about freely, claiming space in a chromatic reverie.