Andrew Millner: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Andrew Millner’s (BFA 1989) solo exhibition, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose: The Poetry of Repetition” opens on October 21 at William Shearburn Gallery in St. Louis, MO.
Gertrude Stein famously claimed “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily.” To Stein, whose creative and theoretical work anticipated postmodernism, language referenced itself as much as it did the tangible universe. A “rose” in a poem written during the modernist era (and, arguably, even more so today) reminds one not just of the bloom, but of the rich history of verse in which the proud flower was valorized. So, too, do Millner’s voluptuous figures reference multiple layers of information – mimetic and imagined, digital and “real” – to which we cannot have full access. Like Stein, he engages the law of identity, “A is A,” but Millner moves away from the rhetoric of thricefold repetition (“is a rose is a rose is a rose”) in his art-making process. His depicted rosebushes do not chiefly reference a type of familiar flower, or even the digital photograph taken of the flower as the artist’s initial step. Millner’s “rose,” not unlike Stein’s, means more for what it could be than for what it surely is. What our eyes struggle to make sense of gains its own distinctive lyricism– an exercise in repetition that blurs the divide between technology, chance, and the artist’s hand.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Artist reception: October 21st, 2011
William Shearburn Gallery
Saint Louis, Missouri