McMILLEN SEES INTO NATURE OF THINGS

Michael McMillen likes to transform the detritus of society into art.

“I like to use things that are seen as junk but in a new context become objects of power,” he said. “There’s a lot of poetic irony in that. Using things that are nothing and making them something almost has a spiritual quality to it.”

McMillen, who shares space at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art at South Coast Plaza with painter Mark Stock through March 14, is best known for his fragmented miniature buildings made of dull colored wood, metal and paint that look as though they’ve been ripped from their foundations, victims of tidal waves, hurricanes or worse. In the museum’s modest sampling of 12 pieces, the miniatures are outnumbered by oil paintings of burning vehicles, entangled pipes and assorted other apocalyptic visions.

“All of my pieces link together,” said McMillen, 39, in his Santa Monica apartment above his studio. “There’s the theme of the inevitability of entropy and of constant change. I express that through certain types of disintegration of form and structure. Nothing is static--that which is new becomes old and the old thing just becomes new.”

His creation of miniature houses (begun, as was his painting, in the early ‘70s) was due in part to his cramped creative quarters. “I was working in a two-car garage, so it was practical to build small objects,” he said. “But also the idea of altering scale is interesting--to change the outside of objects that we’re used to. It alters our perception but it also focuses it (on details).”

In the past, McMillen has given the miniatures--which he refers to alternately as facades, masks and constructions--facial attributes, such as making windows into eyes, doorways into mouths. “There are primitive, head-like qualities to the masks,” he said. “I’m melding architecture with primitive masks. There’s implied personality or presence in the work. They’re a fragment of something that’s gone, an artifact of something that’s lost. The houses are pretty much all invention, based on observation.”

The son of a scenic designer, McMillen, a Santa Monica native, entered Cal State Northridge as an engineering major but switched to sculpture, in part because science didn’t give him “the satisfaction of seeing a physical product.” His original ambition was teaching, but he fell into prop building for films (which he continues to do for a living) because there were no teaching positions available after he left UCLA with a master’s in fine arts. Fascinated with architecture, McMillen also builds full-scale installations that have ranged from a musty garage inhabited by a broken-down car to a miniature desert complete with industrial site, mobile home and rusty machinery.

He is reluctant to reveal the meaning behind many of the recurring symbols in his work--he’d rather leave that up to the viewer. What do the pipes represent? “Conduits for the flow of information.” The numerical sequence 13313 engraved in many of his pieces? “A cryptic number.” Skeletons? “Another acknowledgment of the temporal nature of life.”

One particularly brain-teasing work is “Mrs. Grant’s Shrine,” an assemblage with a clocklike body that houses messages in foreign languages, a cartoon of Pavlov and his dog, an advertisement for Mrs. Grant, spiritual psychic, and other assorted gizmos (thermometer, skeletons, razor blade). In the center is a group of concentric circles surrounding a cap of a cosmetics can that pictures an all-knowing eye, perhaps of Horus.

“I’ve always been interested in shrines, not that I’m especially religious but because they’re folk objects with a certain power, because they deal with the unseen,” he said. “In that work I was trying to give a sense of time and a strange belief system. It’s an amalgam of different philosophical points of view, like an altarpiece. It’s one person’s search for God knows what.”

A painter of burning cars, volcanic eruptions and other images that could be viewed as something less than euphoric, McMillen says he’s “sure there’s always a negative element, but the fact that I’m making art is an act of faith. There are some apocalyptic visions. They’re a blend of comedy and tragedy, like life is.”

Areas he’d still like to explore? “I’d like to design a building or an interior,” he said. “What I’d really love to do is use an abandoned hotel and make an amazing journey to go through that would transform you by the time you reached the other end.”