Michael C. McMillen at L.A. Louver

Visitors to Michael McMillen's captivating show passed through a squeaky screen door into a space whose darkness and indigo walls made it feel like the outdoors at night. A small painting of natural catastrophe (Marine Landscape) hung on one wall, and a cast-bronze traveler's trunk sat on the floor in a pool of light. Hugging the gallery's back corner was the centerpiece of the show, an L-shaped structure built of distressed corrugated metal, a sign on top reading "Red Trailer Motel." McMillen's screen-door entry set the mood for this absorbing installation, providing a physical threshold that echoed the visitor's concomitant passage into a vaguely familiar past, and into a space furnished as much by the metaphoric as the mundane.

The "Red Trailer Motel" rested on a bed of stones that crunched underfoot in brittle counterpart to the bluesy harmonica, piano and vocals that occasionally wafted through the space. The building looked convincingly like a shabby fragment of a larger structure, sparsely attended by the detritus of rural life--shovels, gas cans, tumbleweeds and old tires. A light over the office door cast a sorry glow, and the door's handle was missing. Views into the three numbered motel rooms through lensed eyeholes presented a similar mix of persistence and decay, presence and abandonment. The views within appeared continuous with the scale of the exterior but were in fact meticulously constructed miniatures. In each, McMillen staged some kind of movement, incongruous or disarming, subversive and poetic.

Behind the beige door to room number two spread a ramshackle interior, wires hanging loose from the ceiling, broken bedsprings on the musty floor. The view extended past the disheveled mess out the room's back door, where one might have expected to see a hallway or alley, but instead, a few live goldfish twitched back and forth, oddly out of scale and out of place. Discontinuity also lay behind the next door, of dirty mint green, where empty liquor bottles and an animal skull framed a screen showing a short film made by McMillen. The quick-cut montage joined found and new footage of gestures such as wagging fingers and flailing arms, sites such as factories and motels, and objects like old signs, funnels, a sinking boat and turning gears.

McMillen is expert at establishing a sense of place through subtle light and textures defined by time and use. An L.A. native, he brilliantly merges two homegrown traditions: the technical spectacle of the Hollywood stage set and the scrappy realism of assemblage tableaux, a la Kienholz. Into these settings of palpable specificity, he injects the ambiguous and discontinuous. He invites voyeurism, then complicates it, delivering something that speaks reflexively of authenticity, desperation, grit and magic.

--Leah Ollman

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