Tuesday, March 22 - Saturday, March 26

8:00am – 5:00pm CST

The Carlos Gallery in the Visual Arts Building

 

Phoebe-Agnès Mills is a figurative oil painter whose painterly and colorful pieces meditate on ephemerality and loss in an optimistic light. Through dissolved boundaries, obscured figures, and experimental play with light, she attempts to capture the melancholy joy of existing in a world that changes from one moment to the next.

 

In this exhibition, figures are depicted outside, in various seasons, melding with their surroundings, and stamped with the light of the environment. Painted with urgent, expressive brushstrokes and thick paint, this body of work condenses the human experience of life and loss into tangible, material images.Thick paint that rises from the surface resists illusionism, making the bodies that are depicted appear both more tangible and less real. A desire to exercise control and capture moments is evident through the use of selective rendering. Some moments in the pieces are rendered clearly, making them feel still and held, while others are rendered loosely, dissolving and falling apart. The figures are framed in environments that are fluid and ephemeral, indicating that the world around them is unstable and changeable. Spaces are not only defined by change but also by absence, using marks that carve out shapes using negative space, defining a thing by what isn’t there.

 

Bright, vibrant colors characterize this impermanent world, indicating that a world full of change and loss is not purely dark and painful. Through broken forms, convoluted environments, and the use of negative space, these paintings reconcile apparent contradictions of light and darkness, change and stability, and past and present using bright colors and musical brushstrokes. Through the resolution of these contradictions, this work depicts the human experience of ephemerality and mortality as bright and beautiful, even in the light of loss.

 

 

Phoebe-Agnès Mills was born and raised in Tennessee, and has been trained by Mia Bergeron at Townsend Atelier in Chattanooga. As a full time Sewanee student, she will be receiving her Bachelor’s degrees in Art and Philosophy from the University of the South this May. In 2021, she studied at The New York Academy of Art as a full scholarship recipient, and exhibited work in their juried show. Along with two solo shows in Stirling's Coffee Shop, Mills has had work hung in the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC as the first place winner of her district’s Congressional Art Competition, in Townsend Atelier, and as the runner up of the AVA Juried Members Show in Chattanooga. Aside from choreographing for a student-led dance production, she is currently producing a body of work for her senior thesis show, working on a commissioned portrait from the University of the South, and is planning to attend a workshop at Florence Academy of Art, and the Mudhouse Residency in Greece this upcoming summer.