Salon: May 27th, 2023
The core idea of the Tack Room is to look at art work and have a conversation about it. In late May, the Tack Room took the opportunity to host a one-night show featuring the artist Jeff McMillan. Jeff was passing through town having just been a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts. While his visit was not long enough to have a regular show and opening it offered the perfect moment to try a pop-up style salon for the evening. A handful of local artists were introduced to Jeff and his work over a lovely night of pizza and conversation. We were only sorry that more did not get to see the show. The echo of the horse cribbed beams and the open-air architecture of the Tack Room synched nicely with the subject matter and process of Jeff’s beautiful work.
Jeff McMIllan
For McMillan’s two-month long Headlands residency in Northern California his studio became a holding ground for found objects and residual materials gleaned from the natural surroundings. In the past the artist has employed wrapping, folding, embossing, painting, printing, and exposing materials to the environmental influence of time and weather to posit ideas on transience, truth and beauty. McMillan has long been asking if it is possible to make a non-fiction work, where truth to materials renders an object or image ‘true’ to itself, while at the same time becomes more than the sum of its parts.
It is unusual for the abstract and the uncanny to aesthetically and emotionally rub along with each other, yet McMillan, in working with familiar objects and giving them an other life, has made an other language…
Deborah Levy, Boxes and Books, 2019
Biography
Jeff McMillan is an American artist based in London. Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1968, he received a BFA from Texas Tech University (1991) and an MFA at the University of Alabama (1995) before moving to the UK in 1998. His work approaches painting through materiality and process, often in dialogue with the found object. His work is held in public and private collections including Tate, London; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands and San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas.
He has had recent solo exhibitions at Kristof De Clercq Gallery, Ghent (2021 and 2018) and Handel Street Projects, London (2016). In 2023 McMillan was Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, California, and in 2020 was Abbey Painting Fellow at the British School at Rome.
Group exhibitions include Art is the Antidote, Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands (2022); Folds, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London (2021); Fuori le Mura, various locations, Rome (2020); Books + Papers II, Christine König Galerie, Vienna (2019); Fading Away, 22,48 m2, Paris (2018); 250th Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London (2018); Five Easy Pieces, Large Glass, London (2017); ABJAD, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2015); Boule to Braid: Curated by Richard Wentworth, Lisson Gallery, London (2009); and the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2002, 2004, 2006).
As a curator McMillan created and ran the project space PEARL from 2001-2004 and has since organised a number of exhibitions including the abstract drawing show Tell it Slant at Frith Street Gallery, London (2016) and I AR YOU: Portraits by Self-Taught American Artists at Large Glass, London (2013). He was co-curator of British Folk Art at Tate Britain in 2014.
