Millicent Young: In The Silence Between

Overview

MILLICENT YOUNG: In the Silence Between

KAATSBAAN CULTURAL ART GALLERY

On View June 5

"Veteran artist Millicent Young has lived in a number of places—including decades in rural Virginia, and now upstate New York ...as she has pursued a highly creative, highly autonomous career. Her wall works, an amalgam of resonant materials nearly Shaker-like in their austerity and beauty, owe their spiritual reach to the horsehair and muted metal she makes use of."

Nearly biblical if also abstract, this work suggests some sort of ancient conundrum--the string enters into space from within a darkness whose meaning we can only intuit. (We remember that in Genesis, darkness preceded light, not symbolizing the ending of life--but rather, its start.) Then the sculpture named In the Absence of Fear dramatizes our understanding of something breaking open, under extraordinary pressure: a piece of brown fur barely escaping the cracks of four iron-oxide panels, surrounded by a steel, variegated frame. The primal emotions associated with these works are accentuated by their titles’ drama, meant to install within the viewer an abstract imagistic power...In conversation Young has emphasized that these works are not memorials. Instead, they are introductions to the state of being that immediately precedes existence. So they are not endpoints but beginnings. Usually we conceive of darkness as something final, but in these enigmatic works, they are introductions to the future. Thus Young mines the dichotomy between darkness and light to create art abstract and myth-like, attaining significant meaning.

--Jonathan Goodman for White Hot Magazine