Jennifer Leigh Coates Millard

Artist Statement

My work is focused on the concept of intimacy and its ever-present opposite, alienation. I read these as analogous to Freud’s eros and thanatos–the “sex drive” and the “death drive.” The interplay between these poles is not reserved for sexual intimacy, although it offers a useful lens for unpacking sexuality in art. (For example, Queer Theory has undertaken brilliant readings of sexual otherness using these concepts.) Marx’s theory of alienation, in which the worker becomes dissociated from what he or she produces, is another way of reading this duality. That is, life-making pursuits and relationships under a competitive (as opposed to collaborative) exchange model make it impossible to have connection without depersonalization.

Given the nature of these two impulses, human relationships are often self- or mutually-destructive; and yet, we cannot live without them. This tension pervades my work. The closer the relationships, the more impossible they turn out to be.

I try to sit uncomfortably with these “monstrous intimacies,” as the literary scholar Christina Sharpe calls human bonds with racialized and post-slavery power dynamics. Much of my writing deals with similarly destructive gender, racial, or power dynamics. In the end, I hope that my readers will be able to mourn the inevitable failure of connection, but also learn the redemption of being loved imperfectly.