Untitled (lungs)

Rodney McMillian’s work grapples with the complexities of race, class, and place in America across a wide range of media. In his sculpture he often redeploys domestic materials and approaches the conventional terms of painting— wall-bound, cloth-based. He engages not only history and contemporary culture but also the potential for alternative realities and future transformation. The giant, ominous, bodily forms of Untitled (lungs) manifest current political and social tensions through their own insistent physicality: they simultaneously project into the room and hang abjectly down toward the floor; their shapes are soft and organic, but their surfaces are opaque and appear calcified; they are absurdly larger than life, but they prompt greater awareness of our own fragile, pulsing bodies.