Millie Chen: TURBULENCE

RiverBrink Art Museum Summer 2024 Exhibition

Millie Chen, TURBULENCE: PEACE BRIDGE, 2024, graphite and watercolour on paper.

Millie Chen
TURBULENCE

May 11, 2024 – September 14, 2024
RiverBrink Art Museum, Queenston, ON

Turbulence is caused by unsteady vortices, chaotic eddies and other flow instabilities.

Turbulent events are caused by unrest, disruption, conflict and resistance.

Millie Chen’s exhibition, TURBULENCE, contemplates the interrelationship of phenomenon, history, social justice and sorrow. The exhibition title is named after a new series of drawings; the first three works in the series will be exhibited at RiverBrink Art Museum, along with older (2015-2023) works on paper.

Millie Chen, STAIN, 2015, digital print, ink, watercolour of paper. Photo credit: Chance Mutuku

Chen crosses the Onguiaahra (Haudenosaunee) or Niagara River almost daily. The new series of drawings emerges from years of walking along both banks of the river and gazing in awe at its flow. These drawings focus on river sites that have historic and symbolic significance, embodied in the turbulence created by disturbances under the water surface.

All of the works in the exhibition are connected by the use of grids as a structuring device. The grid is a powerful generative mechanism that integrates singularities into an all-encompassing structure where everything is linked and empty space is matter. Chen uses the grid to both retain and release control, as a means to embrace unpredictability and “errors” and to express the wobbliness of being human. These incursions into uniformity and regulation amplify the grid’s enigmatic qualities, inviting chance and intuition. The grid contains order, chaos, grief, and limitlessness.

Millie Chen, ROCKS, 2017, gouache, watercolour, graphite on Stonehedge White Vellum. Photo credit: Chance Mutuku

Artist Bio

Millie Chen’s artwork has been shown across North and South America, East Asia and Europe at venues and festivals including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, The Power Plant, Toronto, Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, Centro Nacional des las Artes, Mexico City, The Contemporary Austin, Shanghai Expo, Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, and FILE-Rio: Electronic Language International Festival, Rio de Janeiro. Her work is in several public collections including Buffalo AKG, University of Colorado Art Museum, Art Bank of Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Pacific Railway, and Toronto Transit Commission. Her most recent awards (media arts grants from Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council, and a University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship) are for SRS (Silk Road Songbook) www.silkroadsongbook.com. Chen is a Professor in the Department of Art, University at Buffalo. www.milliechen.com