Wardell Milan’s home state of Tennessee cuts a wide swath across his recent body of work. References to the Vols (Andrew Jackson’s militia as well as UT’s sports teams), and even honeybees (official state insects) make regular appearances in the photographs. Also prominent are images of the artist and his family, casually mingling alongside musclemen pinups culled from vintage magazines. The resounding influence of his Southern heritage bleeds into more general art-historical references. We see images and figures cribbed from William Eggleston and found imagery of agrarian African-American life, all watched over by the perverse specter of Joel-Peter Witkin.

The photographs derive from dioramas hand built with a motley assortment of materials: found or borrowed photographs, model railroad vegetation, and custom-made cardboard architectural models. While the components are varied none is arbitrary, each one is carefully chosen and signifies a unique aspect of Milan’s story. These tableaux become the site and subject of photographs that contain numerous and conflicting moments of flatness and limitless space, historically frozen and frenetically present time, ancient memory and current reality. Works like Burning Giraffe also reference the history of painting, where De Chirico’s mysterious colonnades and Dali’s tendency toward melting mix with boxing and nature photographs, keeping up the spirit of Surrealism and the charge of Dada’s contradictory juxtapositions.

In the series of works on paper titled Desire and the Black Masseur (2004-2005), figures are abstractly tangled, dislocated limbs act as stand-ins for whole bodies that are executed with smudged graphite overlain with precise hash marks that then soften and merge into softly rendered shadows. Each tattered, asymmetrical drawing becomes a wrestling ring of tangled men and Bacon-esque grappling, with gaping, gasping mouths and bones showing through sinew and muscle as if we had x-ray vision. These athletically crafted drawings are full of visible effort—drips and drabs speckle the surface as if anointed with the artist’s perspiration. Milan borrowed the series’ title from a short story by Tennessee Williams, about a shy young man who is fascinated with a black masseur. The notion of desire plays heavily into Milan’s work, and encompasses all the conflicting emotions that it conjures up: romance, love, idolatry, sadness, loss, and anticipation.

Wardell Milan earned his MFA from Yale University in 2004. In that same year he attended the Skowehgan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Greater New York at P.S.1 and Log Cabin at Artists’ Space, both in 2005. Milan’s photographs are currently on view in Frequency, curated by Thelma Golden and Christine Kim, at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Nov. 9, 2005 to March 12, 2006.