There's a Gothic quality to Dean Millien's aluminium foil animal sculptures, some of which are displayed prominently in his Bed-Stuy studio space: a silver calf, a skeletal cat with its ribs showing, an alligator head. But the rest are piled on the floor. The 52-year-old Millien is not precious about them, he says, because he's repairing and tweaking them just as often as he's building them. "I like horror," he says; he likes that the indents he presses to suggest the creatures' eyes make them look like skulls. Recently, Millien's been making a lot of spiders, some shiny, some sparkly.
Working in the medium since age 19, he knows which different brands of foil are right for which jobs. Reynolds Heavy Duty is thicker and more durable, but also has a smoother and shinier look, perfect for finishing. He grabs a dinner tray from a pile to show me, and that's even thicker, suited for holding the sculptures together. He grabs the cat—"This guy, I'll fix him up, give him a little more meat"—and he shows me how the trays wrap around bones made of wire. "That's ideal, so I have a lot of these," he says. The thin stuff gets so many creases in it that it starts to look like glitter.
Millien is often characterized as an "outsider artist." He sculpts from a material that most of us consider totally disposable, and his work is often jostled, piled, and patched, yet somehow, they have an eternal quality. These days, he exists on the very border of inclusion into the mainstream fine art world. So does James Fisher-Smith, the 30-year old painter who's gotten some success from his subway drawings, and whose living room is Millien's studio space, which Fisher-Smith provides to him free of charge. "An art world where I succeed but Dean doesn't is one that's untenable to me," he explains when I asked him why he donates his living space.
Millien has lived in Brooklyn for nearly his entire life, and is one of New York's born and bred artists, the son of Haitian immigrants, and lives on public assistance. Fisher-Smith is a white transplant from California with a two bedroom apartment, who's been able to survive for a couple of years without working. As real as the differences in their circumstances are, they are both artists who, every once in a while, sell their work for a few thousand dollars. And New York's hostile housing and art markets have made them allies, and have brought them together in Fisher-Smith's apartment underneath the J train.