Get Lost in the Light With Canadian Visual Artist Jordan Söderberg Mills
Jordan Söderberg Mills has, for some time now, been 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.
RIGHT: “Throwing Shapes,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by the artist
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 could create those transitions; how it works as “a bridge between an object 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.
Canadian Visual Artist Jordan Söderberg Mills
“Standing Wave,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by Chris Goldstraw.
Canadian Visual Artist Jordan Söderberg Mills
“Standing Wave,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by Chris Goldstraw.
Canadian Visual Artist Jordan Söderberg Mills
“Chanel Research,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by the artist.
Canadian Visual Artist Jordan Söderberg Mills
“Anaglyph Multiples,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by Devin Lund.
Canadian Visual Artist Jordan Söderberg Mills
“Eternal Light and a Spotless Mirror,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by the artist.
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 distorted, colourful, and infinitely refracting images of the viewer, thus re-contextualizing them as the centre focus of the art.
“Common Pulse – Proof of Concept,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by the artist.
“Deep Circle,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by Franziska Krieck.
“Chapelle Boondael Proof of Concept,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by Artist.
Mills explains how bringing the viewer into the piece is the essence of how people engage with art in the contemporary world — when a person snaps or shares a photo or video of a work, they’re transcending the role of observer and becoming a participant. Mills is interested in how opening up the capacity for others to engage with art allows it to be seen in different ways, and for the art to act as a tool for others’ creativity. “When I see a video on Instagram of somebody dancing in front of one of my pieces, it’s just fantastic. It adds a protagonist that isn’t me because it isn’t about me. It’s about everybody else,” he muses.
RIGHT: “The Five Fields,” Jordan Söderberg Mills. Photo by Aaron Hargreaves.
Perhaps it is the way that Mills’s work is created out of the tension between the scientific and the unknown, but his art emits an atmosphere that approaches sacredness. This is more explicit in some projects, such as Eternal Light + a Spotless Mirror: a mirror that takes a single point of light and explodes it into a large array, intentionally giving “the depth and breadth of what eternity might look like,” says Mills. The installation was produced for an exhibit about the Flemish Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck, as a nod to Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a polyptych attributed to van Eyck and his brother, Hubert. In the painting, there is an inscription above the head of Mary that refers to her as a “reflection of eternal light in a spotless mirror.” Mills says that both his art and spirituality are united by seeking to inspire a feeling of awe. “What I’m trying to produce are these artifices that open up portals into different ideas or perspectives on reality,” Mills explains. “That’s what spiritualism is trying to do as well, in some ways.”
The connection between his work and the divine is even more marked by the project he’s currently working on. In Belgium, many churches that sat empty for years were turned into businesses — and some along the coast became lighthouses. Mills found this transformation interesting, how “the idea of a guiding light can be something that is faith-based or can be something very practical.”
The city of Brussels accepted his proposal to rework the decommissioned Boondael Chapel into a public art piece. By fitting its windows with three-dimensional glass tubes that capture light and bounce it in a total internal reflection, he created vortices. This technique is inspired by the Fresnel lenses used by lighthouses, which draw in ships by dispersing light in a particular way; Mills found there to be a serendipity between that and how the stained glass of a church window draws people in through its glow. As always, Mills remains working in the tension between two ideas, whisking up magic from strange in-between spaces — kind of like how beams of light cast out brilliant colours by bouncing back and forth inside of mirrors and glass.
