Followers of mysticism say that the world is interconnected.
They say that the world is one, a single entity, tied up in the knot of Time. To experience this unity is to have a vision. To know this oneness is to be a strand in the mesh of the universe. A drop in the sea.
This is mystical connection. The numinal moment.
Illumination.
Art often tries to shed light on the notions of interconnection and relationship; of a world tied up in bonds, social, philosophical and psychological. In her ongoing mixed media series, Distant Relatives, artist June Marie Milham explores (and creates) a world of unexpected connections.
Though her work isn’t about illumination, it is about connection.
Hers is not of world of mysticism, not exactly. Nor is it a world of clearly aligned relationships. It is a world of intimate mysteries, where juxtaposition of image, language and color create constellations of Idea that we are challenged to decipher.
Like celestial constellations, the elements of the works are clear, just as the stars are sometimes clear in the sky. Yet the canvas refuses to be one, reducible thing.
The works of Distant Relatives allow us to draw our connections and create a story out of what we find on the canvas, a little bit like the stories of the Heavens with its Cignus, its Draco, and its Orion. But here the first reading leads to a second…
Something about what we are looking at seems to deepen.
The work in discussion here is humble, despite the grandness of these introductory remarks, because in the end the work is about people when they have given up their separate-ness by force of time, photography, and art. So forgive the cosmic language as we go on, but remember that mysticism is the through-line between the biggest and the smallest of things, a tack stuck through the knot of Time.
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Begun in 2010, Milham’s mixed media series is titled Distant Relatives. Photographs from bygone eras, mainly portraits, are set within canvases that also include a collage of objects, images, and words.
The photographs are sepia and black and white, belonging the washed out chomosphere of the past.
In Kiss we find two figures in a photograph, cropped to their outlines. It is a bearded man in a suit and tie sitting down and a woman standing behind him, placid with hands behind her back, wearing a dress that rises up and up only stopping just below her ears.
An “X” is drawn through the woman’s face. Beneath the figures a band of tape bears the one word: “Grandpa”.
This is a situation of exclusion. It is a situation, therefore, of inclusion as well. The definition on inside and out.
It is also a situation of mystery. The question “why” rings through this piece as we study the images of these people, black and white, formal, reserved and distant, but who nonetheless evoke enough emotion to be scratched out. One of them.
The word “Grandma” does not appear beneath the figures. She has been removed, in a way, though she is still present in the piece. She is outside anyway. Visible but nullified. An X instead of a name or a title.
A circumstance like this stands as a symbol, perhaps, for the entire series. The people in the work are both here and gone. Re-imagined in Distant Relatives, this somewhat drab family portrait has returned to our world from 60, 70 or 80 years ago. They are here again, because of this work of art. But it is because of this piece that we realize also that they are gone.
They have been gone a long time. Dead.
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Reading Distant Relatives this way is really just a first encounter; a first connection. Questions continue to arise, as if out of the past, as we continue to engage with the work.
How are these two people related to each other? Are they really husband and wife? If so, then isn’t she the “Grandma” to his “Grandpa”? What happened to earn her an X? And who drew that X? Who chose Grandpa over or against Grandma?
Somehow we become implicated as the X-er. We are the ones who come after, who possess this family photograph as we view it in Milham’s work. We give it meaning. And so we decide why the X is there over Grandma. We have to decide. There is no one else now but us who can.
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A phrase appears above the two figures in Milham’s “Not Every Kiss”. That phrase, which gives the piece its title is: Not Every Kiss Is Sexual.
Just when you thought you had it figured out, right?
We arrive at yet another layer of connection and interconnection.
The words connect to these two people. The suit-fitted “Grandpa” and the crossed out, assumed Grandma are both connected to this phrase, somehow. But how?
Should we take the phrase to suggest that the X-er has been coddled too much by this woman with an X on her face? That the woman once had to defend her behavior with a phrase that explains while it also evades and excuses?
Superimposed on the background of “Not Every Kiss” is an image of schematic, molecular drawing of a protein.
We arrive again at a new layer of connection.
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Two people. An X through the face of one of them. Black and white, unsmiling. The woman’s hands patiently held behind her back as she stands behind him. A phrase hovers above them, not every kiss is sexual, and the science of the body forms in the background, a web of connecting lines that make up the physical things which we are.
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Each work in the Distant Relatives series brings the past into the present, creating a series of connections and suggested relationships between language, image, color and idea. Though it is difficult to explain how Milham’s works do it, there is a notion in Distant Relatives, across the series, that the figures of the past presented in these works symbolize a collective history.
We all understand the world we live in, now, today, to be collective and to belong to all of us equally. We are equally in it, naturally, and so we possess it equally.
Our view of the past does not always follow this line of reasoning. Pictures of people from the past do not belong to each of us equally. These phantoms, these sepia-toned beards, suits-and-ties and high dresses become defined by a family name and take their meaning from that name, just as they give meaning to that name.
Distant Relatives takes those names away.
The result is a liberation from genealogical limits and hereditary claims. These photos show us people who belong to our world, collectively, connectively. They are tied to us and tied up in the knot of Time, showing us, sometimes, that a smile is as mysterious today as it was 75 years ago.
That beauty existed in the world then as it does now, fleetingly, but certainly and within the vast intimacy of our human circle.
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June Marie Milham’s works in this series naturally suggest a metaphor for understanding them. Each piece in the Distant Relatives series reads like a family tree. Not because they tell us about our genealogy, but because the further we study each work the more we see the outlines of a story emerge.
The connections might remain suggestive and mysterious between language and image, but, just as a branching of the family tree, we come to realize that there is a meaning pointed to within the shape that these connections make.
In a family tree we recognize the importance of each branch because we wouldn’t be here to look at the picture of the tree if those branches did not exist. The implications are obvious. Yet the actual, human story of each branch is hidden.
The fact that one person met and married another and the pair had children is obvious. It is written. Yet the meaning of that writing, despite its importance to our own existence, is fragmentary, merely signified, and very nearly absent from the family tree.
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If we attempt to engage emotionally with a family tree, we find ourselves grasping after substance, and falling short.
In this regard, Distant Relatives succeeds in giving us the substance required for an emotional response. We see the faces that would be in the family tree. But they are not the faces of our family. At least not our genealogical family.
These are people with their own story.
In another work from Distant Relatives, a photo depicts three men who appear to be brothers posing for a family portrait. A phrase written across the bottom of the photograph reads: It’s in our blood. Numbers run up the side of the canvas: 123. 123.
A notebook page is imprinted in the background of the work.
There is a story in this. There is a story and it is almost clear.
Looking at this piece of art is like catching a glimpse of a hawk’s shadow on the ground as it glides over you. You know with certainty that it is a hawk, even from the corner of your eye, but when you look up the sun is too bright and you’ve lost the bird in the sky. You have to be satisfied with your intuition. With the shadow.
There is a story. And it is almost clear.
The contours and the details of the story on the canvas may take a while to emerge from the work as we watch and consider these three men. 1. 2. 3.
It’s in our blood.
One. Two. Three.
Two of the men have beards. One wears a long-ish mustache. They look alike enough, all of them, to be brothers. They are connected. That is the one thing we know with certainty. These men are connected. This piece is about connections. The series is about connections.
Standing in front of these works, we become connected too. As the layers of photo and image and language and color open up to us we get tangled in the wires that tie them together. Again, we are implicated.
At some point you stop and ask yourself, “Am I related to these people? Are these my relatives?”
And you think they might be because in the act of looking back at these grey-lit images of the past re-imagined upon these colorful canvases, you have taken ownership of the people in the portrait.
But that’s ok. They do belong to you. These brothers belong to you. But they belong to everyone else too.
In the present moment, in this series of works, we can all share the past and let it shape our imaginations of where we’ve come from; of the unexpected bond which knots us up in Time, singular even in our multitude, significant even after we’ve let go of our identity.