Page 104 - BFM F/W 2024

JORDAN SÖDERBERG MILLS HAS, FOR SOME TIME NOW, BEEN could create those transitions; how it works as “a bridge between an object
living and working from his husband’s old family home in Germany, surrounded by castles in the countryside. Gifted to his spouse’s ancestor by the kaiser, home to refugees after the Second World War, and then briefly functioning as a hotel, the Italian-style villa is now the base from which Mills dreams up his obscure and moving creations of glass, light, illusion, and magic. The Canadian artist says the place is “definitely haunted,” and that there is a “strange alchemical aspect” of working in its basement, like a monk in a cave. The comparison seems fitting for the artist, whose work is, in a way, devotional, maybe not to a god, but at least to the inscrutable mysteries of the world.
Mills’s art is concerned with, in a word, light. His work — which has been featured as public art and in exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic — plays with light as though it were no different than metal or stone. In his installations, light is sculpted, refracted, and unwoven into colours to create stunning visual fields. Mills began his career by working with more substantial materials. He worked first as a blacksmith, doing an apprenticeship with a master in Chile in a studio in the foothills of the Andes. His master taught him that “the beauty of an object lies in a moment of transition,” says Mills. When he later studied at Central Saint Martins in London, he saw how light
and the space around it.”
The interesting thing about working with light, and the aspect that gives
Mills’s installations such an atmosphere of magic, is that we still don’t have a good grasp of what light is. “We’re flooded by light every day, and we don’t really understand fundamentally what it’s made of or how it works,” explains Mills. He mentions the discovery of how light functions as a particle only while we are observing it; when we cease to observe it, it functions as a wave. This discovery raised still more questions, for scientists and Mills himself — not only about what light is, but even about the nature of our overall reality.
The more Mills learned about light, the less he understood it. Mills realized this meant there was an opportunity to create work within that space left by our lack of knowledge. Because we don’t understand light very well, work that makes expert use of it seems more magical than technological. Mills points to the classic Arthur C. Clarke tenet: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Engaging with Mills’s art isn’t a passive process. The work absorbs and redefines the environment and the viewer, frequently encouraging direct interaction. This is especially true with projects like An Infinite Self, an installation that looks like a portal to another dimension. The portal reflects
104 BFM / FW24 FEATURES / LOST IN THE LIGHT
ETERNAL LIGHT AND A SPOTLESS MIRROR BY JORDAN SÖDERBERG MILLS