Roxann Arwen Mills: Phoenix rising

Graphis, May/Jun 2001 by Frolick, Stuart I

Roxann Arwen Mills needs to take a deep breath. The thirty-something Los Angeles-based photographer is so smart and articulate about her work, and so anxious to talk about it, that one barely has a chance to encounter it on its own terms-and to be moved by its mystery and beauty. Her dark, saturated color palettes, eerie urban environs and moody portraits communicate her deepest personal concerns. But Mills' richly textured imagery also transcends the particulars of her own psyche to resonate in the imagination of the viewer. At a time when most of us have been numbed by the sheer volume of pictures that are put in our faces every day, Mills' work reminds us that a still photograph still has the power to stop us in our tracks and make us wonder, consider and feel. At her best she masterfully explores the seams between dark and light, literal and abstract, reality and fantasy, known and unknown, subject and object, conscious and subconscious.

Her pictures also slip through the traditional distinctions between photography and fine art. Mills' images have been called "painterly," but unlike other artists-who-use-photography, she considers herself a photographer first. A good deal of her picture-making takes place on the computer, yet she objects to terms like "manipulated" and 11 altered" because they imply that her final result is somehow separate from her original vision-which it is not. Nor is her original vision for a finished print fixed in her mind before she begins shooting. While Mills is in total control of the technical aspects of her work, free-spirited, unbridled play is key to her creative process. Perhaps categories just aren't relevant to a discussion of her work. Listening to Mills describe her three-and-a-half years at Art Center College of Design (1993-1997), one imagines her with one foot on the dock of photography, the other in the departing boat of fine art, and Mills finally "finding herself" in the ever-widening sea of digital imagery.

Seated in the downstairs studio of her "French/Spanish" home in L. A.'s mid-Wilshire district, Mills says, "My work was very different before Art Center. I was confused about who I was and what I was making. I was very interested in street photography and had been doing photojournalism for a couple of years, all in black-and-white. I entered Art Center as a photo major, but found the curriculum too rigid. After two terms I wanted to take classes in film and painting and poetry-other disciplines that connect the arts to each other. But you only have so much time. The school is very intense-you have no life when you're there-and you can end up working very hard at things you're not good at. The Fine Art program was very conceptual and it was difficult going back and forth between these worlds that were considered very different things."

Even after changing her major to fine art, Mills continued to use her camera in initial approaches to class assignments. But it was the computer that turned out to be the ideal tool or medium for Mills' self-revelatory journey. It freed her "to just sit and play and experiment for the first time, without worrying if the work was good or bad," she says. Today, digital imagery is so prevalent on the visual landscape that it's easy to forget the hard-won acceptance that its pioneers struggled for less than 10 years ago.

"The digital revolution has shown photographers to be artists," she says. "We're no longer trapped by the expectation of literal representation that photography has traditionally been linked to-in a way that film and painting never were. The computer opens up a rich visual environment that gives photographers an enormous amount of freedom. But in the beginning there was a stigma attached to it. A fine art instructor once said of a piece of mine, `It looks tactile, but it's not. Why not just paint it?' I said, `It's not about paint.' And a photo instructor said, `That's not a photograph. It's beautiful, but it looks like an illustration.' Those of us working digitally just didn't fit in. No one knew quite what to do with us."

Conceptually, the driving force behind all of Mills' fine art photographs is her passionate interest in the emotional and psychological components of dreams and myths. For this reason she is always on the lookout for the defining nuance, detail, or gesture that will reveal the "truth" of her timeless moments. In practical terms, it means that she follows her instincts in determining subject matter, selecting a location or choosing a model. While shooting, she stays open enough to let something happen, observant enough to recognize what will be useful later and in control enough to either repeat or tweak the action-very much as a film director would. The analogy is not lost on Mills who lists films like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror, Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot and Bill Viola's The Greeting among her primary influences.

Born of French/English and Russian/Latino parents in Chicago, Mills grew up first in a small town in Indiana, then in a suburb of Buffalo, New York. She had no clue that her life's work would be in the arts, though her father was a lithographer and her older sister, a gifted painter. As a child Mills was more interested in Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolkien than in the visual arts. She attended four different high schools before leaving home for California at 15. The rest of her life story is reminiscent of the television series The Fugitive -she has lived in many places and toiled at many jobs-most of which were spiritual dead ends. After a few years back in Chicago followed by a corporate stint in Houston, Mills moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'80s. Her earliest photographs were artistic travel snaps made in the South Pacific and Mexico. Friends who'd seen them begged Mills to shoot their portraits, and, finally, she did. Encouraged by the response to her work Mills took night classes in photography at Pierce Junior College and two years later she enrolled at Art Center on a full scholarship.