DailyServing contributor Allie Haeusslein had the opportunity to speak with Miller about her distinctive process and approach to wide-ranging forms on the occasion of these two exhibitions.

Liz Miller. "Recalcitrant Mimesis, " 2012 at David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO. Mixed media installation. Photo credits: Paul Winner. Courtesy of the Artist.

I’m really interested in your use of materials, which for me seem to play with notions of weight and weightlessness, ephemerality and permanence. How do you select and think about the relationship between your various materials?

My installations have recently been comprised mainly of synthetic felt with a stiffener in it—this is what most of the installation at David B. Smith is made of. I like this material for many reasons. It conveys fragility, but is actually very strong. It has multiple associations. Felt is used in crafts, but also has industrial applications. It is highbrow (fine, woolen handmade felt) and lowbrow (the craft felt that I use). I love the fact that I can start with a soft, tactile material and manipulate it in ways that are structured and architectural. Lately I’ve been referencing the silhouettes of weapons in many of my works. I like the contradiction between the softness of the felt and the violence of the source materials.

With your current exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery, you were asked to create a site-specific installation utilizing the work of Clyfford Still as a point of departure. How do you typically select the forms employed in your work?

The forms in my installations are usually hybrids. I love merging organic forms with synthetic ones, benign forms with malignant ones, contemporary forms with historical ones. Through simplification and recombination, shapes lose their original connotations and take on new and varied meanings. I manipulate shapes by mirroring, bending, and folding as well as through color choices. The manner in which a form is draped, suspended, or folded can completely change the way the viewer reads that form. Ultimately, forms gain resonance through their relationships with one another and take on new lives within the installation.

Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the Abstract Expressionist movement. I am curious to know if any of the concerns embodied by this movement have informed your work, or this project in particular.

Abstract Expressionism championed the individual gesture, and Still’s work is no exception—the idea of active, gestural mark-making is present in his large, bold canvases. Surface is also important in his work—there is intensive layering and tactile paint handling that makes his colors resonate and gives them depth. In some regards, the idea of translating an abstract expressionist’s gesture to a cut form is futile—my work only has hard edges. The gesture becomes frozen and generalized. I think this dissonance between my process and his is an interesting one.

Liz Miller. "Untitled 03 (Mimetic Deception)," 2012. Mixed media on paper 24.5 x 19.5 x 8 in. , framed. Courtesy of the Artist and David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO.

Given that the majority of your works are room-sized installations, your smaller scale works are an exciting departure; they feel like psychedelic Rorschach inkblots. Can you speak a bit about these works’ scale and their bright, bold colors?

My smaller works on paper are a very different experience—but they share many of the same attributes of my installations. Although my installations are commanding in scale, I feel like my smaller works on paper have an attitude of courage and experimentation that often is one step ahead of the installation works. They are not schematics or diagrams for the larger works, and yet invariably the kinds of decisions I am making in the works on paper end up appearing in the larger works. I’ve been playing a great deal with tension in the smaller works, and this is starting to appear in my larger site-specific projects.

The colors in the works on paper are probably truer to my usual palette than the palette of the installation, which referenced some of Still’s color choices quite specifically. Bold color is a way of seducing the viewer, of presenting them with an enticing façade. It is also a very immediate way to separate forms from their original contexts. A fuchsia machine gun part, for example, is suddenly separated from its source without much manipulation of the original silhouette. I’m very interested in how visual information is conveyed in the form of charts, graphs, diagrams, sonar, radar—any kind of mapping of information. In such mapping, intense color often is indicative of a hub of activity…or a problem. Consider storm radar imagery, for example. The more intense the color, the more violent the storm. This play between beautiful, seductive color and sinister events is something I enjoy tampering with. And certainly the amped up color gives the smaller works an intensity that belies their diminutive scale.

Liz Miller. "Ornamental Invasion" at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Photo credit: Amanda Hankerson, MIA. Courtesy of the Artist.

You mentioned an interest in violence with respect to both your formal choices and selection of color, which I find quite interesting given the incredible beauty and intricacy of your works. How has this concept informed your current or upcoming projects?

I’ve always been interested in forms that embody both beauty and violence. Past points of reference have included invasive plant species and storm radar imagery. More recently, I’ve been drawn to weapons from a wide range of historical and geographic locations. While I’ve become fascinated by the conceptual implications of utilizing their forms in my work, the initial attraction was formal. Despite the brutality of their intended use, the lethal functionality of arms is matched by an intent focus on exquisite formal beauty. When removed from a militant context, many weapons can be taken for decorative arts objects due to their intricacy and high level of craft. I find it curious that we commit brutal acts with these amazingly beautiful objects.

In addition to weapons, I’ve been looking at military configurations and uniforms. There is a highly aestheticized component to war that I am just beginning to explore. Ornament, costume, order, and precision become part of war’s visual landscape. It’s the default position to focus on imagery that is overtly violent: all the obvious dramatic tension is found there. But I’m more interested in how beauty is used to maintain a sense of authority, confidence and control in the midst of turmoil and brutality.

I’m still at the very beginning of my work with this imagery and am excited to see where I can go with it. Last spring I did a project that allowed me to explore objects related to arms and armament from the Minneapolis Museum of Arts’ collection and to implement them in an installation at the MIA. And just a few months ago I took a research trip to Washington, DC to spend more time looking at various historical weapons and uniforms and considering their potential roles in upcoming projects.

While weapon forms were not part of my recent project at David B. Smith Gallery, the linear, militant, firing-squad arrangements that I’ve been exploring in other projects come through in the linear sequences of this work, albeit in a more subtle, Still-influenced manner.

Acclaimed and often contested artist Eric Fischl is currently exhibiting a new series of eight large paintings titled Corrida in Ronda, featuring images of bullfighters engaging in the Corrida Goyesca. Held in the Andalusian town of Ronda, the fighters dress in eighteenth century attire that falls in the era of the classic Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Goya actually designed the distinctive costumes, which are still worn by the fighters today in this special event.

Like previous bodies of work, Fischl focuses on the particular customs of a community and builds a psychology within the paintings through formal considerations of light source, color palette, and viewpoint.  Corrida in Ronda has been exhibited this year at Jablonka Galerie in Berlin and will travel in 2010 to the Centro De Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Málaga, Spain.

The exhibition will be on view at Mary Boone Gallery at 541 West 24th St. until the 19th of December.

Play With Your Own Marbles is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at San Francisco’s NOMA Gallery. The exhibition, which is curated by Betty Nguyen, Creative Director of First Person Magazine, brings together three Los Angeles-based artists in an examination of artistic process and its relation to utility, both in object and image. The exhibition highlights the objects and cyanotypes of Walead Beshty, the meticulously rendered photorealist drawings of Karl Haendel, and the formal concrete “paintings” of Patrick Hill.

Play With Your Own Marbles is not only linked through the evident formal and aesthetic concerns of each artist, as the show is remarkably connected through its homogenized temperament, graphically monochromatic palette, and overall deconstructionist sensibility, but each artist also plays with a strong sense of irony through material, form and method of display.

Patrick Hill

Patrick Hill has applied thick bands of concrete, absorbed and stained into a black velvety surface revealing small crevices of color, opening a dialogue between a strictly modernist approach to painting and the everyday utilitarian material of concrete.

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Kraft Box………… sculpture, which contains custom shatter proof glass cubes placed inside standard Fed-ex boxes, displays the evidence of wear as an object travels from one location to another. These ready made materials are further “improved” by the imposing alteration of travel. In addition to the sculpture, Beshty also presents several photographic images of isolated objects produced by placing the otherwise utilitarian forms on photosensitive paper, rendering them useless of their original function. Images of crumpled paper and eyedroppers begin to resemble abstracted paintings, drawings and monoprints further removing the viewer from the object’s original state and placing it more in the realm of the artifact.

Karl Haendel’s photorealist graphite drawings subvert functional objects by manipulating scale, content and source imagery. Haendel’s imagery and method of presentation is generous in it ability to be easily recognized though careful rendering and specific depiction of everyday materials such as paper, razor blades, nails and paper clips. However, the work subtly unfolds and challenges the viewer through its coded symbols and methods of display. Haendel presents a delicately drawn image of ripped paper on a plywood platform supported by stacks of art magazines, which plays with the viewer’s physical perspective to drawing and the repetition of material (paper) through multiple forms. This work is presented along side images of blades mounted to wood gently resting against a wall and large scrolls of paper containing references of would be titles for the exhibition, all of which playfully discuss the relationship between concept and material.

The collections of work in Play With Your Own Marbles are subtly seductive, engaging the viewer first through a whisper and later through a tug of the ear. Each work takes the utilitarian object and subverts it to reveal new potentials that have the ability to exist on a sliding scale of completion, remaining in a state of flux both formally and conceptually.

Play With Your Own Marbles will be on view in San Francisco through October 3rd.

English painter Richard Patterson takes miniature toys and covers them with voluminous paint, photographs the object and then recreates it in oil on canvas. The artist largely focuses on formal issues in his work literally reducing representation and figuration by covering the figurines in globs of visceral paint. Patterson also draws a connection to art history by referencing color field painters of the modernist period. Richard Patterson is a graduate of Goldsmiths College (1986), and recently exhibited with Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. The artist has also exhibited with the Dallas Museum of Art (2000) and with the James Cohan Gallery, NYC (1999). In 2007 Patterson will have three paintings exhibited in the Rowan Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and will be the first artist commissioned by Wallpaper* Magazine to collaborate on a feature and have work on the cover (March 2007).