Visual Poems

Visual Poems is published on the occasion of Alter Altar: 20 Years, a solo exhibition at merge (Stone Ridge, NY) and Beyond Words at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, September 2023.

VISUAL POEMS Millicent Young

When There Were Birds iv dimensions variable grapevine, hair, thread, clay, lead. earth 2019-2023

In The Abeyance

Things here are held here in abeyance. Encountering Millicent Young’s sculptural work, I’ve entered a realm of quiet restraint. “When There Were Birds iv” and “Husks” convey the sense that the constituent elements are selected, arranged, and then, placed in stasis, like a deep inhalation of breath cut short. In these sculptural works horsehair hangs beneath ceiling mounts, wooden armatures, and recovered tree branches to ribbon the air with such stately composure that it feels that if a breath disturbs this earnest equilibrium, it should not be mine. In fact, the loft where this work is mounted was originally designed to siphon and concentrate the intermittent wind to facilitate the winnowing of grain. So, when these pieces are stirred, they will be moved by the respiration of the earth. Perhaps I should call this attitude “reverence” — this recognition that there are forces larger than me and that their presence is being invoked here.

However, reverence often depends on the core feeling of something or someone occupying a higher station than our own lowly one. Indeed, I find markers for this divergence in Young’s piece “When There Were Birds iv” where the separation between the kingdoms of air and earth are starkly rendered. Here, Young has made the winged aspect of what might be an avian body abandon its corporeality, leaving below a skeletal structure (which is actually local harvested, dried, and peeled grapevine) to wither on the earthly plain while the spirit remains aloft, journeying toward evanescence. But taken together, the work gathered here for the exhibition Alter Altar, constitutes more than exploration of

Three Husks

detail of installation

dimensions variable

steel, wood, hair

2008-2023

oppositional states of being. Instead, Young is locating herself and us, her witnesses, in an interstitial space of attentive waiting.

I think here of Young’s relationship to poetry. She has written: “Poetry continues as a central presence in my work. Poems house something that eludes capture by the visual and this has been a driving hunger, a seeking I have been following for years. There is something (good) poetry is and does that I want my work to be and do.” In particular, these pieces call to mind a lyric by Jane Hirshfield, a Mill Valley-based poet, essayist, and translator with whom Young has a deep and supportive friendship which began more than 20 years ago.

In Hirshfield’s poem “Tree” the speaker declares “Even in this / one lifetime, / you will have to choose,” between “That great calm being, / [or] this clutter of soup pots and books.” This is the world that most of us are used to — a world of binaries, of opposition, of contradistinction, where decisions are made, things are categorized, and we then proceed lockstep towards a horizon of those instigated consequences. For Alter Altar, Young brings to light what had been a hidden vista existing where even the keenly insightful poet didn’t quite see it.

Young’s “In the Silence Afterwards” demonstrates that the choice of where to be or how to live need not to be so starkly configured. The work is a composite installation, consisting of a wall-mounted cedar sapling that the artist found and transformed by charring it. It is

held in place by steel brackets, and placed beneath it are adobe clay pieces bound up with various dry pigments, horsehair, and sand, all resting on a narrow wood strip painted to match the wall, and a central ghostly, graphic, handmade stripe of umber pigment and pencil placed in the center of the composition. Within this strip Young has scribbled runic symbols that are signs of that which is unvoiced, disappeared and unremembered. Simultaneously, the piece makes allusion to that forgotten past of the sapling in its forest, among a throng of cedars, and its future here where it is sheltered and held in honor. That central stripe that the artist has drawn creates an ephemeral pathway that somehow suggests the infinite, and adjacent to it, the unfired clay formations with wisps of dog hair thrust into their crevices read like synecdochic representations of a vast landscape in which there is more to grasp than the forlorn disparity of either/or.

Similarly “Sanctuary 2022 CE” seems birthed from hands that have carved out a moment of carefully considered being from within the tangle and heap of the woods. Charred cedar saplings burred with knots and ridges that indicate their origins in the aromatic heartwood of the trees are hung from the ceiling, above the ground, more or less evenly in two groupings bifurcated by another tree sapling drawn to appear simultaneously as a gap on the backing wall, and here as well, scratched within that drawing’s margins are those graphite marks that gesture at a language whispered under the breath, unintelligible, but requiring utterance nevertheless. This is the space in which one can live between the clutter and the transcendence, between the helter skelter of both the sylvan countryside and the urban environment and the hushed tones of the consecrated sanctorum.

Sanctuary 2022 CE 144 x 70 x 92 inches

charred cedar, pigments, drawn directly on wall 2022

Young’s installations are a kind of detainment, but not punitive or indifferent. Her objects, like wisps of memory, hold space for a full spectrum of being: becoming the bird that took off from the ground, became airborne, and left its limbs behind; the skeleton that feels at one with the ground and will slowly merge with it over time; the tree limbs that hover, never quite touching either realm just as we dream, hovering between life and death, momentarily conduits to that which might astonish us.

The temptation might be for the viewer to regard Young’s work as tributes to the natural world where the great calmness of being is fully present. But the artist does not look at nature with such fetishistic lenses. The materials she draws on — saplings, dog hair, horsehair, stones, earth, and clay, found wood, barbed wire, plaster, grapevine, rope, washi paper, gesso, gold leaf and glass — are a combination of naturally occurring things and that which is human derived. This exhibition shows that Young extracts found objects from environments just as chaotic and haphazard as any human habitation. She places them in conversation with that world created by humans: a world suffused with objects that are decorative, aspirational, rooted in our reality while gesturing to something a little beyond it.

This is the case with “Bequeath” her second project merging sound, poetry, and sculpture. Embedded within the sculpture is a five-and-a-half-minute motion-activated audio track of voices — human, amphibian, avian, and that of the earth itself. Here she interprets another poet, Gregory Orr who generously lent his poem “This is what was bequeathed us”

for Young’s interpretation. As I approach the piece which looks like a deconstructed practice piano, I hear the voices start up. Now the motion sensitive monitors spark the voices into being. They murmur as if meaning to impart some piece of wisdom. I listen and wait for the sound to inhabit me. Some necessary angel suspended between here and there is calling to me and means to hold me in their thrall, and for the moment, I am neither husk nor seed.

—Seph Rodney

Seph Rodney, PhD, was born in Jamaica, and came of age in the Bronx, New York. He is a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic, and now regularly contributes to The New York Times. He has written for CNN, NBC, Art in America, American Craft Magazine and penned catalog essays on Lisa Corinne Davis, Teresita Fernandez, Meleko Mokgosi, Sarah Oppenheimer, and Gary Simmons among others. He can be heard weekly on the podcast “The American Age”. His book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, was published by Routledge in May 2019. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize and in 2022 won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Bequeath 35 x 67 x 21 inches

deconstructed practice piano, scrap wood, galvanized roofing, ceramic, sheet music, encaustic, pigments, paper, text, thread, steel rod, android tablet, bluetooth speakers 2023

BEQUEATH

Embedded within the sculpture is an audio track of voices – human, amphibian, avian, and tellurian – including the songs of two recently extinct species of birds. The five and a half minute track is motion activated by the viewer coming into the presence of the sculpture.

Gregory Orr lent his poem “This is what was bequeathed us” from How Beautiful the Beloved @2009 Copper Canyon Press.

Congregation dimensions variable ceramic, earth, pigment, grass, roots 2023

Congregation and Three Husks installation

dimensions variable

ceramic, barbed wire covered with pages from Night by Elie Wiesel, wood 2021-2023

Composition for Elie Wiesel

Composition for Elie Wiesel details

dimensions variable

oak, steel, red iron oxide, rope, ceramic, dolly, steel

2004-2023

The Lading (for Eve and for Mary)

The Lading (for Eve and for Mary) detail

A n Unfinished Story 116 x 24 x 20 inches washi paper, ink, pastel, steel, glass

2016

An Unfinished Story detail

Score for Unexploded Ordnance and Depleted Uranium 26 x 29 x 5 inches wood, wire, sheet music, graphite on paper, thread 2023

Unnamed

42 x 36 x 8 inches wood, sheet music, galvanized roofing, steel rod

2023

Unnamed detail

Arc for Ariadne

11 x 64 x 33 inches

wood, adobe, rope 2004

Arc for Ariadne detaill

Three Origin Stories in the Sixth Extinction (deconstructing Rapunzel) h to 140 x 61 x 28 inches ceramic, hair, thread, charred timber 2014-2023

Three Origin Stories in the Sixth Extinction (deconstructing Rapunzel) and Bearing installation

Bearing

106 x 93 x 37 inches charred cedar saplings, pine lumber, rope, clay 2022

Bearing detail

Bearing installation

Bearing artist

Calypso

100 x 44 x 64 inches

repurposed galvanized roofing, horse hair, wood dowels, copper, steel bolts, sheet music, cable 2023

Calypso and Bearing installation

The Journey’s Long Perfection detail

Instructions

23 x 51 x 2 inches

wood, mixed media on gessoed board, steel rod, wire 2023

Instructions detail

Kerosene Beauty

23 x 51 x 2 inches

wood, mixed media on gessoed board, steel rod, wire 2023

Kerosene Beauty detail

Remains 160 x 56 x 56 inches

Remains 160 x 56 x 56 inches

charred wood, steel, fumed glass, lead, text

charred fumed glass, lead, text

motion activated audio track, solar battery

motion activated audio track, solar battery

2022

2022

Remains details

REMAINS

The motion activated sonic track is made of three layers of sound: the song of the last living – now extinct – Kauai O'o bird; the human speaking voice; and the voice of a crescendoing fire. The five minute track is initiated by another being – animal, human – coming into the presence of the outdoor installation.

Jane Hirshfield lent her poem “Let Them Not Say” from Ledger @2020 Alfred K. Knopf.

Remains

Coals

39 x 51 x 17 inches

earth, charred timber, mixed media on gessoed board, lead, thread 2023

Coals detail

This Was My Home, My Body, My Voice

128 x 67 x 6 inches

wood, barbed wire, fur, roots, pencil pigments, drawn directly on wall, 2022

Window 23 x 51 x

2 inches

wood, mixed media on gessoed board, steel rod, wire 2023

Window detail

21 Grams

59 x 29 x 11 inches

scrap wood, wire, galvanized roofing, thread

2023

21 Grams details

War Diaries: (shallow burial)

21 x 12 x 11 inches

scrap wood, plaster, clay, thread

2022

War Diaries: (barrel bomb)

25 x 12 x 12 inches

scrap wood, plaster, black iron oxide, red iron oxide

2022

When There Were Birds iv and Composition for Elie Wiesel installation

Three Husks and Congregation background

When There Were Birds iv foreground installation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Visual Poems was made possible by the generosity of friends and their enduring belief in this work. To Meg Hoberman, Madeline and Drew Masterson, Cynthia and Jim Stultz, Zakira Beasley, Meaghan Golden and the estate of Diane Golden, and two cherished donors who prefer to remain anonymous, my gratitude is immense and eternal.

In memory of our mothers, named and unnamed. Mary Ann. Diane. Lyn. Virginia.

The creation of Bequeath was supported with an Individual Artist Grant from New York State Council on the Arts and Arts Mid Hudson.

ARTIST PHOTOGRAPH

Katvan Studio

PHOTOGRAPHY

Pete Mauney

Reinhold Spiegler (pages 12, 32, 33, 36)

DESIGN

Kemper Conwell

PRINTING

T&N Printing Charlottesville, Virginia

front cover

An Unfinished Story detail

back cover

Congregation detail