From the site of atrocities, Millie Chen forces us to look at our humanity in stain

Traveling to capture footage for her most recent installation, Millie Chen came across an empty room. Chen was in Cambodia, in Tuol Sleng, the infamous site of a high school used by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, when she had the idea to photograph the whole room.

The result is stain, a fascinating new set of 80 panels on display in the Body of Trade & Commerce Gallery on Niagara Street. Each panel is a digital print of a tile from that room, with gouache and watercolor images painted on top.

Chen, an artist and professor at the University at Buffalo, explained that she was not sure if she was going to do anything with the photographs she took.

What do you do with material from a site that had such atrocities? she said.

Her first attempt at resolving that conundrum resulted in the three Washed prints that are each a single drain tile in the floor. The dull, brownish-gray tile surrounding the nearly sparkling metal drain cover provide a glimpse of what stain has in store.

What she finds in these 80 tiles is a floor tile palimpsest, ready to continue the thematic exploration of previous work like the The Miseries & Vengeance Wallpapers as well as the video installation Tour, which were recently exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Both of those pieces worked through the disappearing residue of human violence that has become overgrown by nature or suffocated by the din of history.

Stain fits in with those pieces as a middle ground, with an accessible layer of colorful cultural touchstones barely shrouding the possible violence scrubbed from the tiles.

Theres a layer of humor that lets you access it, but its much deeper than that, said gallery director Anna Kaplan.

Littered with records and posters, a Slinky, Twinkies, a yellow smiley face pin, her mothers address book, roller skates, a page from Chens high school yearbook, and other detritus from the zeitgeist of the 1970s, the tiles make straightforward juxtapositions that dont easily resolve themselves the longer you spend with them.

This is mostly due to the ambiguity of the abstract blots and cracks in each tile, creating a creeping sense of unease in the back of the mind. There are chips and cracks in some of the old concrete floor of the gallery as well.

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From the site of atrocities, Millie Chen forces us to look at our humanity in stain