NYAB Event - John Miller "Suburban Past Time"

John Miller "Suburban Past Time"

Metro Pictures

This event has ended.

John Miller elaborates on many of the tropes he has masterfully cultivated throughout his thirty-plus year career in “Suburban Past Time,” his latest exhibition at Metro Pictures. Through artificial rocks and plants ranging in scale from massive to ordinary, wallpaper, store-bought and handmade decorative elements and the continuous presence of two people, Miller transforms the gallery into a bizarre yet familiar public space. The works included in the exhibition are a continuation of the artist’s ongoing sociological investigation into so-called middlebrow culture, which focus on artifice in Western consumer societies.

To evoke a sense of the generic, Miller pastes two vector print wallpapers depicting exterior views of nondescript plattenbauten, or apartment blocks, in Berlin and a beach resort on the working class tourist island of Mallorca, Spain. With the wallpapers are two carpets spelling “NO,” filing cabinets painted in what Miller describes as “hot rod finish,” and an oversized tree and rock that refer to the practice of using fake “natural” objects to hide pool pumps in suburban backyards. Continuously present amidst the installation are two people who either sit on a chair reading or rest on a plinth.

Also on view are a series of flash animations Miller created with long time collaborator Takuji Kogo under the name Robot. Lifting the text from personal ads and setting them to MIDI voice recordings, cultural hierarchies related to age and wealth emerge from the borrowed lyrics of these videos projected on the gallery’s walls.

[Image: "Suburban Past Time," installation view, 2012. Metro Pictures, New York.]

Media

• Sculpture
• Installation

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