Biography



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Wardell Milan (b. 1977, Knoxville, Tennessee)

Building upon a conceptual foundation in photography, Wardell Milan’s practice encompasses drawing, collage, and painting to explore ideas of the body, beauty, and the unconscious. His multi-media works often reference and incorporate the imagery of artists such as Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Eugene Richards. 

Through cut-paper and collage techniques, he constructs striking human subjects with reclaimed photographic elements, contending with the medium’s visual lineage and its claims to representation.
These composite, fragmented figures inhabit ambiguous landscapes of painted abstraction, navigating themselves through recontextualized historical and contemporary environments.
Through them, the body—the physical, the psychological, and the photographic body—is understood as a multi-faceted, intersecting site of gender, race, sexuality, and history.