Michael C. McMillen: "Train of Thought," the current exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is a retrospective look at the career of Michael C. McMillen, an internationally renowned Southern California-based mixed-media artist. The exhibition features large-scale multisensory installations, assemblages, sculptures, paintings, drawings, and films that invite viewers into McMillen's imaginary world.
Michael C. McMillen: Train of Thought" is OMCA's second experiment integrating a special exhibition into its standing survey of California art. It works even better than the first, "The Marvelous Museum: A Mark Dion Project."
Part sculptor, installation artist, printmaker, and cultural anthropologist, McMillen has been creating environmental installations with architectural references that deal with themes of time, change, and illusion since the 1970s. Opening in stages, with large-scale installations Lighthouse and Pavilion of Rain (a constructed habitat featuring rain pouring down on a shack of corrugated metal surrounded by a 30-foot pool of water) currently on view, the exhibition features work from OMCA's holdings as well as select loans from private collections.
Retiring curator Phil Linhares selected nearly seventy pieces that reveal the artist's quirky humor and stunning craftsmanship. (As a boy, McMillen was friends with a Frankenstein special-effects "theatrical magician" and has himself worked in set design for such films as Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) McMillen's dilapidated but psychically charged stage sets with their peephole glimpses into oddball miniature worlds strike a nostalgic but (hopefully) funny chord.
Some highlights: very short humorous films made from found footage that reward repeated viewings despite their brevity; "The Box of All Knowledge," a sealed footlocker of undisclosed "contents"; "Picasso's Last Words," an empty wine bottle presumably preserving 21g of Mougins air and soul; "Train of Thought," a railroad trestle emerging from a wall-mounted tunnel that stops in midair, dropping an occasional alphabet pasta letter into a semiological pile below; the Rube Goldberg pinball apparatus of "Deliverance," delivering a bean through a straw onto a dinner plate; a Cornellian array of unprepossessing household junk, "Museum of Wax, Strings and Springs"; "The Raft of History," a fragment of combined sailing man-of-war and Victorian house; and "Pavilion of Rain" and "Red Trailer Motel," evocative walk-in stage sets of derelict buildings — "time markers" — the latter replete with summer-night sound effects and vistas into seedy interiors.
The exhibit closes this Sunday, August 14.
Interview with the artist: http://museumca.org/exhibit/michael-c-mcmillen-train-thought
Interview with Kenneth Baker: http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-06-16/entertainment/29664085_1_curatorial-career-california-art-philip-linhares
A 190-page catalog accompanies the exhibition and will be for sale in the OMCA Store.
Michael C. McMillen: Train of Thought runs through August 14 at Oakland Museum of California (1000 Oak St., Oakland). 510-238-2200 or MuseumCa.org
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