NYAB Event - Nicole Miller “The Borrowers”

Nicole Miller “The Borrowers”

Koenig & Clinton

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Koenig & Clinton announces The Borrowers, the gallery’s first exhibition of video works by Los Angeles-based artist Nicole Miller. The Borrowers features three recent single-channel videos played in tandem: David, Ndinda, and Anthony. Their subjects as their namesakes, the works spotlight unique individuals, set against an ambiguous backdrop, whose performances employ representation, appropriation, and theater as tools for reconstituting that which has been lost.

Implementing a method common to the artist’s practice, Miller devised a controlled narrative structure for David, Ndinda, and Anthony within which her subjects were free to extemporize at their discretion. Whether through storytelling, improvisation, or mimicry, these unscripted moments enabled access to authenticity during performance.

In David, a man stands askew in front of a mirror while recounting the story of random violence that resulted in the loss of his left arm. Simultaneously, he gesticulates to generate a false image of his missing appendage in his own reflection — an exercise that relieves the pain of phantom limb. Ndinda introduces a narrator who intersperses dialogue with unprompted eruptions of roaring laughter. An instructor of therapeutic Hasya Yoga (laughing yoga), Ndinda utilizes the same method of performance for the camera that she offers in her classes, triggering a parallel cathartic response in the video’s viewers.

Framed by theatrical spotlights and crimson drapes, Anthony Aquarius takes center stage as a Jimi Hendrix impersonator. For the duration of Anthony, the musician performs “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”, two songs originally composed for the musical Hair that were combined and made famous by Nina Simone. The singer first lists material items she does not possess (“I ain’t got no home/ain’t got no shoes”), then follows with attributes of her physical vitality (“Got my liver, got my blood/I’ve got life”). Haunting the present with vestiges of the past, Anthony offers its audience a borrowed persona, whose body signifies both presence and absence: the image of a lost figure, extolling the power of physicality through song.