The Dodd Galleries presents a series of new paintings by MFA candidate Phoebe-Agnès Mills, titled Ekstasis. Influenced by accounts of mystical visions and modernist theories of profane illumination, these works consider how the spiritual might be sensed within the material world. Rather than seeking revelation through apparition or fantasy, they invite a slowed, temporal encounter...
The Dodd Galleries presents a series of new paintings by MFA candidate Phoebe-Agnès Mills, titled Ekstasis. Influenced by accounts of mystical visions and modernist theories of profane illumination, these works consider how the spiritual might be sensed within the material world. Rather than seeking revelation through apparition or fantasy, they invite a slowed, temporal encounter in which the viewer becomes aware of their own position in the membrane between presence and absence, vitality and decay.
Images are alchemized using paint, as well as with a novel technique that merges painting with photography. This hybrid process renders the fixed surface of the photographic print unstable, its fluidity transforming ink to paint and resulting in an image that merges human touch with mechanical. The images themselves draw from everyday encounters–leaves, water, bodies, animals– yet through isolation and heightened attention, they become charged with numinous gravity. Ordinary forms become thresholds when submerged in water or illuminated by light. Bodies dissolve into abstracted color and form
in water, light gives a glow, shadows take on life beyond their sources, suggesting the body’s extension outside itself.
Rather than depicting transcendence as escape, this body of work depicts ordinary moments that become extraordinary when opposites collide: light and shadow, matter and spirit, life and death. Ecstasy appears here as a rupture in perception, a brief yet electric moment of revelation through phenomenological paradox. These visual tensions evoke the ancient meaning of ekstasis: to stand outside oneself, to be momentarily displaced.
About the artist
Shaped by an atelier training, time spent living in a French monastery, and early experiences of death and bodily fragility, Phoebe-Agnès Mills investigates the body’s role in mediating between the material and the spiritual. Having been raised at the juncture of paradox by an academic from Berkeley, California and a poet from rural Louisiana, dialecticals persistently inform her work and surface in depictions of light and shadow, absence and presence, clarity and dissolution. Her work is informed by this lived experience, as well as by time spent in a French monastery, and her background in dance and somatics.
For more information, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Dodd Galleries and Atheneum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu. The Dodd Galleries are open M-Fri in the main Lamar Dodd School of Art building, from 6:30am-6:30pm. The Lamar Dodd School of Art is closed on weekends, University holidays, and home game days.
Ekstasis is supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate: grace.mercer@uga.edu
