Hexton Gallery is pleased to open its 2025 summer season with Riverrun, Andy Millner’s solo debut at the gallery. The title—borrowed from the cyclical opening line of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—evokes a sense of endless flow. For Millner, the river is more than a symbol; it’s a structuring metaphor for how we live, think, and create. “Life happens between the known and the unknown,” Millner writes, describing his practice as attuned not to what is fixed, but to what is open, shifting, and becoming.

Millner recognizes the world as a kind of invisible current—something we move through unconsciously, like fish unaware of the water that sustains them. The pigment ink drawings that comprise these new works derive from both a compulsive exercise in visually recording his surroundings and a quiet contemplation of the hidden poetic moments in nature.

A native of a river town at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, Millner has long understood the world as something that passes through us, not the other way around. Over time, the repetition of Millner’s outlined drawings gives form to this unseen motion: the flow of time, the gaps in perception, the “inches” of life that are everywhere around us and yet so easily missed. Millner’s works lie in the middle ground between motion and stillness.

Shifts in figure and ground blur the boundary between subject and environment throughout the exhibition, drawing attention to the fragility of what we assume to be fixed. Millner’s works don’t seek resolution; instead, they linger in these moments of flux. This is not an attempt to depict the world, but to inhabit it, letting it pass through and leave a trace.

Millner’s works continue the trajectory of his recent set design presented at the Wheeler Opera House last winter as a result of an award granted by The Aspen Art Fair in conjunction with Buckhorn Public Arts and DanceAspen. This collaboration, rooted in Aspen’s rich cultural history, was inspired by the partnership between Robert Rauschenberg and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, highlighting the connection between art and performance.