John Miller and Megan Plunkett “Plus One”
Shoot the Lobster
This event has ended.
Plus One is a tourist, an extra, and sometimes a spy. John Miller and Megan Plunkett approach photography as a form to be subverted through self-imposed restrictions and localized anonymity. Their idiosyncratic processes generate photographs that synthesize randomness into lucidity - a reminder that space and time are the ideal medium.
Since 1994, John Miller has taken photographs between the hours of noon and 2pm – the typical hours of a lunch break. His The Middle of the Day project, generates a seemingly endless series of photographs. Architecture, unidentified strangers, objects, ephemera, and trash are bathed in the same low noon sun. Miller’s ongoing project has a diaristic tone and reads like daily reflections. The first camera used for this project was a MamiyaRZ67 – a middle format film camera. Miller has gone through a variety of cameras but only since last year has he started using him iPhone, but not always.
Over the past year, Megan Plunkett travelled to Las Vegas to photograph the interior spaces of casino hotels with spy cameras and other surveillance equipment, returning several times over the months with cameras disguised as pens, keys and other small accessories that easily accompany a body. Plunkett’s images highlight the space between perception and recognition, between a signifier and a site. Her titles are drawn from the extra roles of films like Escape from New York, a film in which New York literally becomes a prison.
Plunkett and Miller subvert the plus-one’s listless wandering with covert objectives. The objectives could be linked to time, as they are here for Miller, or to the limits of spatial recognition as it implicates the roaming eye in a moving body, as it does for Plunkett. Both artists embrace anti-touristic motives to challenge the programmatic way we think about the symbolism of time or a diminished, augmented memory of space; thus, enabling the Plus One to seize counter-intuitive representations of daily life.
John Miller (b. 1954 in Cleveland, OH) lives and works in New York and Berlin.
Megan Plunkett (b. 1985 in Pasadena, CA) lives and work in Los Angeles.
Media
Schedule
from June 22, 2018 to July 29, 2018
Opening Reception on 2018-06-22 from 18:00 to 20:00