Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition of American artist Rodney McMillian (born 1969). Through his work, the Los Angeles based artist explores the American Way of Life, its historical constructs, and its resulting social concerns. Above all, McMillian’s work investigates the notion of concept itself.

Within his varied sculpture, painting, performance and video practices, McMillian alludes to systems of history, politics, and society. Through these means, he effectively creates a discursive space for philosophical and ethical questions that also serve as instruments to interrogate ideas of the subject/individual and power as they exist within culture and history.

McMillian’s found objects are often pieces of bulky waste, such as discarded carpeting, mattresses, and chairs. The histories of these objects are meant to be excavated by the viewer, keen to grasp the thing’s own testimony of trace and use—the body. With the selection and combinations of the objects, thereby archiving his own contemporary being, the artist himself becomes an author of history. McMillian comments not on universality, but rather absence, which can in its after-effects denote our fundamental concepts of presence and class.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue of works by the artist, to be released in May 2007.