McMillen’s Ingenious ‘Laboratory’

Michael McMillen belongs to an overpopulated semi-lost generation of L.A. artists who emerged in the ‘70s. Their numbers blew the fuses of the system, obliging certain exceptionally talented people to subsist on fairly low-voltage recognition.

If this undeserving marginalized status caused McMillen any dismay, it certainly doesn’t show in his current exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery. He works like a happy hermit junk bricoleur and science nerd who’d do his thing just to amuse himself and an audience of cartoon pack-rats.

The title work is “The Laboratory of Sleep,” an installation proportioned like a child’s room. A vintage iron bed frame painted a loving white bears a large, rusty semicircular vat of uncertain origin. Behind the bed stands a row of oversize glass bottles of the mad-scientist variety. Suspended on poles, they contain a liquid too bewitching to be mere water. It travels from bottles to vat via plastic tubing that deposits it a drop at a time like the elixir of dreams. On an adjacent wall, almost unnoticed, hangs a clock. It was surely salvaged from an elementary school where it spent its days refusing to ever reach the magic number of 10-past-3.

There is nothing new in McMillen’s preoccupation with the alchemy of childhood and memory, in the same sense that there is nothing new about love poetry. It’s just that most verses merely allude to their subject while the blessed few actually evoke it. We do not comment in response. We smile or wax dewy-eyed.

McMillen is a 50-year-old L.A. native with roots in the Assemblage tradition. They are deep. He still lives in the little Craftsman-style Santa Monica house where he was raised by his grandparents. That certainly bespeaks his passion for memorabilia, but the impression of his sensibility isn’t complete without some other facts. The house has been heavily renovated in the stark, dramatic style of current L.A. architecture. Until recent years, McMillen supported his art by working as a studio model-maker contributing to such special-effects classics as “Blade Runner” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

All that suggests the virtuosity he displays in what can only be termed a tour-de-force exhibition. There are pieces in classic found-object style. An old lawn mower handle’s cutter is replaced by a pair of girl’s saddle shoes and titled “Implement.” A restored sea-chest rests firmly locked and labeled as “The Box of All Knowledge.” A machine-gun’s ammo is a belt of yellow pencils. Such pieces astonish with their ability to be social satire, brash as burlesque and simultaneously lyric compositions, delicate as a stifled sigh.

The artist shifts gears radically in a set of metal wall reliefs made of miniature mechanical parts painted ivory white. They look like fragments of space-station models, but titles like “East of Eden” make them into philosophical ruminations on the human estate as a miraculous evolutionary fluke, lost in the stars.

This is already enough to satisfy any audience but McMillen throws in a series of small paintings like “Urban Landscape With Larva” in funky Boschian style. It could all come off as irritating exhibitionism, but it doesn’t. It feels as generously multifaceted as the music of Wynton Marsalis.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice; through July 3, closed Mondays, (310) 822-4955.