James Miller

Region: Northeast

I am standing zipped inside a Tyvek suit, under a tent, staring. And now you’re here with me, in eye. Or shadow. Light filters through glass; through all the plastic and fluorescent paint and shit on the ground; through some airborne dust. Particles disperse and settle.

I identify as a painter, but I encounter the studio as a piece of technology. My working method is hybrid: I combine direct and indirect painting, printmaking methods, and a modified airbrush technique to record and transform material histories, structures, and the environmental detritus around my studio. My canvases are repositories, fixed traces calling to mind filmic artifacts, blueprints, and X-rays. In this way, the work’s content is connected not only to the reflexive spaces of modernist painting and drawing, but to image processing itself.

Through this experimental approach, I develop questions about painting’s engagement with photographic media, while drawing on the surreal residue of my local landscape.