ALLISON MILLER

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present ALLISON MILLER’S sixth exhibition with the Gallery, World. This exhibition will run from 19 October through 25 November 2023. A reception for the artist will be held Thursday 19 October 2023 from 6 – 8 PM. Our eyes are set approximately 6 cm...

In May of 2020, Allison Miller began drawing bold capital letters freehand on paper in black acrylic, cutting them out and photographing them in the landscape: R among banana leaves, S amidst poppies, P suspended on the branch of a copper tree. She then brought the letters back to her studio and glued them down on paper, accompanied by free mark making and strongly-colored grounds. D, A, P, Q, R, S, M, and E all appear.

Protein Candy: Allison Miller has a proclivity to set up painterly problems and turn them into wonderment. Wonderment beaming all the more brightly due to the wrenches she throws into her picture machine. She understands that problems in part define the kind of work a painter chooses to do, and are not to be avoided but embraced. Allison Miller is a painter who can make a riddle out of an answer. Problems for her are the sparkly ruby slippers… keys to another dimension.

Regarding Allison Miller’s new paintings and drawings, it is advisable to watch for red herrings, green ghosts, blue balls, and pale pink smoke screens… when repetition clicks over and becomes pattern. When the decorative function of mark becomes structural scaffolding. When pattern pathologically finds itself in the process of falling apart or coming together. When systems take hold just to be broken.

Allison Miller’s paintings ask viewers to be active participants. Visibly constructed and deconstructed, layer-by-layer, the resulting works are palpable sites of activity. Causing forms, space and priorities to shift and evolve, Miller links viewer to maker by maintaining a constant state of flux. Shapes that read as solid begin to ooze and melt while deep space oscillates between background and foreground. Each forced adjustment of perception makes way for the next, new reaction for both artist and viewer.

Allison Miller’s paintings attest to the evocative possibilities of abstraction. Imbued with a vibrant and dissonant musicality, her hand-drawn lines, geometrically-inclined forms and structural use of patterning coalesce into a graceful unification of disparate energies. Drawing inspiration from a diverse and unlikely meeting of influences, most recently Vuillard, Fontana, and Magritte, the work seeks to render the uncanny and the absurd in abstract form.