Debra Antoncic
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

In “Turbulence,” her exhibition of drawings, watercolours and digital prints at RiverBrink in Queenston, artist Millie Chen focuses attention on past and present, on historical events and memory.

These themes are set against the experience of the everyday alongside, and within, sites of trauma.

In Chen’s hands, the traces of calamitous incidents are buried, but rise to the surface in unexpected ways. This surfacing highlights the fragility and vulnerability of our lives.

Her work has been shown across North and South America, East Asia and Europe at venues and festivals.

“Turbulence,” suggestive of violent undercurrents and forces unseen, is belied by an imposed sense of restraint and calm.

Chen, an art professor at the University at Buffalo, employs a grid structure throughout, one that adds a certain regimentation, producing order out of chaos and linking her current interests with previous bodies of work.

Some drawings focus on sites that have historic and symbolic significance: Fort Erie as a crossing point on the Underground Railroad, the excavations for the Peace Bridge (1925-27) which unearthed more than a million Indigenous artifacts and the Welland River, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812-14.

The ease with which violent histories are forgotten or overlooked is another important theme in the exhibition, explored in series such as “rocks” (2017) and “stain” (2015).

In the latter series, prompted by a visit to Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, a former high school notoriously used as an interrogation centre and prison by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Chen used photographs of the tiled floor as the background for a series of 80 digital prints.

Layered over images of the floor are photographs of objects one might have found in any typical high school in Canada or the U.S. during that time. Arranged in a compact grid of twelve-inch squares, the effect is one of instant recognition and nostalgia for the pop-culture references, tempered by sober reflection on the horrifying history of the site. 

The extreme closeup as a device is continued in the drawing “Nosferatu, Me and The Grid” based on a brief scene in the 1922 film “Nosferatu.”

Chen has a simultaneous fear of, and fascination with, horror films, and has zoomed in on the frame to render this fleeting moment in the century-old film, a scene of an unremarkable forest landscape, to the point of abstraction.

In this instance, the grid becomes a device of restraint, to contain fears of the unknown, those things beyond our control embodied in horror films, those things that both fascinate and repel.

Contrasting this is the mundane reality of daily living, apparent in the delicate watercolour “Particulates I.” 

Yet the accumulation of household dust and other particulates that layer this work is also fraught with anxiety for things we cannot control, from the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Contaminated by particulates from a host of sources, the ordinary becomes a source of risk, the chaos contained by the structure of the grid and Chen’s precise and meditative repetition of the act of drawing.

Chen’s use of the grid as a structuring device provides a unifying element in the exhibition as a whole.

“I use the grid to both retain and release control, as a means to embrace unpredictability and “errors” and to express the wobbliness of being human,” she says. “The grid contains order, chaos, grief and limitlessness.”