John Miller “Early Drawings”

The National Exemplar

poster for John Miller “Early Drawings”

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I got back into painting and drawing in a roundabout way. After concentrating on video during art school, I found that once I got out, I could no longer afford to do it, mainly because production standards had shifted and meeting them was expensive. But I had been writing scripts for some of my longer tapes. This led to making artists’ books that dealt with narrative in various ways. Then I read Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa as well as accounts of how Roussel wrote the book. I was particularly intrigued that he had commissioned the artist Henri Zo to make illustrations as a counterpart to his text. However, because the English translation of the book did not include images, I had no idea what these actually looked like. What interested me was that these various scenarios functioned independently of – or parallel to – the story. This implied that, insofar as they offer a perspective or viewpoint, the scenario could be an ideological building block. That inspired me to make my own drawings for my novella, Contamination. For this, I wanted to make pictures of pictures. I wanted to second-guess the viewer by making images that were already familiar. Looking back on these drawings more than thirty years later, though, I’m not sure I really achieved that goal.


John Miller was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954

Media

Schedule

from November 11, 2018 to December 21, 2018

Artist(s)

John Miller

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