for 2021 Cornell MFA online exhibition, Badminton Tournament, at Bridget Donahue Gallery
erinmillerstudio.com
Here is a hypothetical scenario: What if the artist, Erin Miller, no relation, had a way with the supernatural? What if I once lived in Erin’s hometown of Houston, in an apartment that she swore was haunted? When she came to visit, I bet she would look over my shoulder, alarmed, at some shimmer of ghostly movement in my hallway. I’m confident she’d sprint through the common area every time she left to avoid being beckoned by some malevolent specter. I would not personally encounter any ghosts in this scenario—stuck as I am on the material plane—even though I would often wake up in the middle of the night and feel something was off; even though my neighbor would swear he’d watched spirits cavort behind the building. I would never try to disprove Erin’s sixth sense, nor would I attempt to corroborate the phenomena. Who can judge the perceptual gamut of another? And anyway this is all hypothetical. I swear. Miller’s work just stirs up these kinds of thoughts.
Daisy Breath is something like a deconstructed animation that depicts a trip from one vaguely floral oblivion to another. The narrative builds slowly over the course of thirty-two successive prints until there is so much information that there is essentially none at all. Somewhere in the middle, a phantasmic face appears. There is no one way to see this weird visage. It builds additively across time but drifts laterally through space. There are picture-in-picture fountains, the type that might be seen at an Orlando resort, where the tear ducts should be. The figure screams its mouth out of its own eyes then proceeds to spit out a bunch of red stuff until there is nothing left anywhere but red stuff embellished by a bit of blue. At the beginning, before the face emerged all mauve and squinty, there was nothing but blue stuff.
The suite of prints is suspended inside a lumpy and colorful proscenium that reminds one of a wet, stretched Muppet and gives Daisy Breath the air of an uncomfortable carnival—the type that might make a person tell their friends, “you must go see the carnival, it is uncomfortable!” Taken as a whole, the work approximates the type of dream recall that occurs late in the day when something triggers a subconscious memory. It also suggests an encounter with the inexplicable—the sort that might occur in some of our luckiest moments. It is rare that we get to share such experiences with others. Miller allows us this feat by building instinctively from the most fundamental techniques of her medium and into a multi-faceted, wholly experiential wave of image. The piece prioritizes perception and defeats the notion of a linear timeline. Here, chaos and stillness are one and the same, permanently bound to the pulsing facial features of, well, whoever that is.