Composition/Decomposition: Texts, Erasures and Scores

Joseph Clayton Mills exhibit

This exhibit features the work of Joseph Clayton Mills, an artist, composer and performer who explores the intersection of literary and musical composition.

Spanning a wide range of materials and approaches, including paintings inspired by the working manuscripts of modernist writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Franz Kafka; text-based musical scores; graphic notation; recordings and ephemera, Mills’ eclectic body of work is unified by a deep engagement with materiality, textuality and the limits of communication. 

Mills is a musician, artist and writer who lives and works in Arizona. His text-based paintings, assemblages and sound installations have been exhibited in Chicago, New York and Europe, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker. He is the author of the short story collection "Zyxt." In 2012, he published "Nabokrossvords," a translation of early Russian  crosswords by Vladimir Nabokov. He is an active participant in the improvised and experimental music community in Chicago, where his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Parital), Sylvain Chaveau, Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro and Olivia Block, among many others. His recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte. In 2013, he launched Suppedaneum, a label focused on releasing scores and their realizations.

Margaret Rodriguez
ASU Library
margaret.rodriguez@asu.edu
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Fletcher Library second floor