Continuing through November 14, 2015
“J Street,” a street in Greg Miller’s hometown of Sacramento, is the title of his compelling exhibition of new paintings. In these works Miller looks to the past — both personal and societal — drawing from mass media and popular culture to make densely layered works that are about history and memory. These large, mixed media works combine painting and collage, their surfaces covered with logos, newspaper clippings and images of assorted iconic objects including money, typewriters, alcohol bottles as well as images of women, over which are Jackson Pollock-like skeins of paint. Miller imposes a Pop Art sensibility over the proceedings. The logos of LIFE and LOOK magazines as well as fragments from myriad comic strips and isolated texts culled from other publications and newspapers are juxtaposed with hand painted elements, the text weaving a narrative through the works.
Read from painting to painting, the story is not to be found in the text, it is about Miller’s fascination with the media, his obsession with images of women as objects of desire and sex symbols, and his coming to terms with and making sense of this bombardment of imagery by somehow bringing it all together into a cohesive whole. The works resemble billboards covered with layers of imagery that has been repeatedly torn off and then covered again. I moment at which it is finally varnished represents a continuum of time. While they do not feel nostalgic, Miller acknowledges cultural memory as the present moment having been shaped and informed by the past.
Published Courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2015
