Paul Miller
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THE BED
THE LIGHT BETWEEN US
BETWEEN THE LINES
DESERT SKY
FLOOD AND NEW BOAT
MORNING LIGHT
TROUT
A WINTER LIGHT
THE BOY OF STARS
A SILENT SEASON
A FORGOTTEN SHADOW
A PLACE TO STAND
A SHIRT ONCE WORN
AN ANGEL IN THE BACK FIELD
I STAND WITHIN A SKIN OF SNOW
MORNING
PUSHING BACK THE DARK
SLEEPING IN A FOREST
THE ANGEL OF THE MORNING LIGHT
THE FROSTED VIEW
THE LAND BETWEEN HERE AND THERE
THE PRAYER
THE PAPER KING
Paul Miller was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick in 1957. In 1980 he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Mount Allison University, Sackville, majoring in painting and a minor in printmaking. Paul was the recipient of a number of awards and scholarships during his artistic education years. In 1986 he was granted a Nova Scotia Talent trust award and subsequently a scholarship to study at the Banff Center for the Arts in Banff, Alberta. In 1987 he received a postgraduate scholarship from the University of Tasmania to attend the Centre for the Arts in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 1989. Paul has had numerous solo exhibitions in Sydney, Newcastle and Tasmania, as well as a very early show "The Newfoundland Suite" at the New Brunswick Museum curated by Robert Percival in 1980. His work has been featured in group exhibitions in public and private galleries in Australia, Poland, Romania, Egypt, England, Japan and Canada. His work is represented in important public and private collections in Australia, Egypt, Romania and Canada. Paul Miller now lives and works in Sydney, Australia, where he teaches art part-time. This exhibition will be Paul's first solo exhibition in Canada since he left in 1987. Subsequent to Gallery 78, the exhibition will travel to Saint John and Bathurst, NB. ARTIST STATEMENT: My work has always tried to express a personal story of how I view the world. In the new paintings, the view is one of intellectual contemplation. Theprimary elements in the composition are pickle jars placed on the stumps of tree branches. These jars contain my past and are arranged upside down, emptying out, the image that the viewer sees. The images hover and an exquisite light flickers carried by a messenger to the heavens or the light is suspended on a line held by a lone figure. Or draped between the curving image that stands in the darkness like a forgotten billboard in an empty field. I've lived in Australia for almost twenty years. My work has been filtered through a new lens and a new cultural paradigm, which has shifted my perception and understanding of my Canadian identity. When Dreaming I am most Awake: The work of Paul Miller by Rod Pattenden The word illumination contains a two-fold meaning that describes both the quality of light that emanates out of an object as well as the more interpretative experience of perceiving some insight, wisdom or secret knowledge contained within that same moment of apprehension. It is this quality of embedded resonance and anticipated encounter that glows from the current work of Sydney based artist Paul Miller. These works are nocturnal narratives that usher the viewer into spaces that are visionary and dream like in character. They require viewers to engage sympathy for bringing together perception and feeling, as clearly the works involve states of imagined reconciliation and transformation. Miller is a curious cultural hybrid. He has lived in the vast dry terrains of Australia for nearly 20 years, while incubating in this series of works, a world of relations that draws on his childhood memories of New Brunswick , Canada . Physically isolated from his primary imaginative landscape he has found new purpose in returning to the vocabulary of icy enclosure to evoke a richly colored environment of deeply felt emotional appeal. Miller is exploring a world of personal signs and emblems that constitute a vocabulary of reconciliation with the stark memories of his childhood narratives. These works stand outside many of the current fashions in arts practice and have more in kin with work from indigenous communities or from so called ‘outsider art'. Such work is often characterised by a strong sense of feeling and attachment to personal narratives, a sense of space and visionary states of apprehension. In particular, it is this heightened feeling that provokes such a comparison, for there is a clear commitment to a belief in the power of the images to conjure change and healing. These works are emblems at an autobiographical level; they demonstrate the power of images to sustain identity during times of stress and to provide new focal points for reconsolidating self-identity – in short for healing. The atmosphere in these works is shaped by stark shadows and prolonged silence. The artist provokes the question of whether we see best at night or at a more profound level when we are dreaming, when visual signs become complex, thick and resonant with association. The dreams he conjures are utterly hopeful, freshly minted and original in conception. They carry within them a history of their gestation as deeply felt meditations upon encounters that have both wounded but also created identity. They are rich in symbolic reference and offer the viewer a world to inhabit sustained by these imaginative references. They are vivid and ecstatic in an otherwise grey and bleak space of cramped memory. Some biographical knowledge of Miller's disrupted childhood may be helpful to underscore the very personal and emblematic nature of the works. For the viewer, the effect is more likely to be sustained through an awareness of the desire for intimate self-revelation and reconciliation to the chaotic elements of the self, to unnamed horrors and fears of the night. This is a cathartic vocabulary that is named within the otherwise silent snow and golden light of a sudden encounter with the self in mystical and transformative ways. Much art concerned with this territory of vision and dream will often suffer from gestures that are overblown and spectacle-like in scale or are alternatively repeated through insipid and pious clichés. In Miller's case, he has succeeded in creating a tangible landscape of meanings that are convincingly portrayed in a manner that invites our consideration of human freedom, frailty and compassion. They share the intent of indigenous culture in expressing a vigorous and spiritually rich identity in defiance of colonising mythologies that seek to oppress and confine the imagination. Many of the works depict a landscape strangely marked with empty jars that serve to populate the space with refracted light. This personal symbol arises from the memory of Miller's grandmother whose preserved pickles provided an economy of generosity and survival in the local community. These symbols convey the capacity of his grandmother, who brought him up, to relate with generosity and to financially and emotionally preserve his life. These little signs of a generous heart are upended. They are enabled to spill their stories into the night and to encourage the further encounters narrated in these works. Miller's fine skills as a colorist are demonstrated in ‘A Winter's Light' where two mittens are afire above an altar, an arrangement based on a workbench built by Miller's father. Whatever personal symbols are at work is secondary to this moment of arrival through enclosing trees to a scene of mystical significance. The viewer is a privileged witness to this timeless moment where ordinary objects with their particular history become aflame with significance and import. It is like those moments in our domestic existence when we are cut to the heart with memories that suddenly burst to life and illuminate an otherwise mundane observation. This sense of dramatic encounter is heightened in the companion work ‘Hands of Grace' where some sort of reconciliation is offered in a space lit by a burning bird – a night messenger. This sense of intimate encounter is further enhanced by a fence that arches around and takes on the form of large embracing hands. The hovering stillness of the figure approximates those moments when we encounter the difficult terrain of emotional reconciliation and awareness. The question of our own authenticity arises in terms of how we have treated the ‘other' in our life, whether that is in terms of human relations, ideals or beliefs. We know the capacity of our self for love, rejection and the rendering of violence towards the things we hold most dear. In this work there is a numinous affirmation of reconciliation based on an inherent belief that the universe of meanings is funded, energised and orchestrated by some sense of relational compassion. These works provide spiritually rich encounters with the luminous nature of memory. The initial naïve charm gives way to a more considered wisdom based on the eloquent human capacity for compassion. Compassion is an appropriate word, as these works contain a deeply held belief in the capacity of vision to offer healing and resolution within the embodied world of finite creaturely life. Perhaps Miller's ongoing struggle to manage the effects of Parkinson's Disease has imbued his work with an urgent and fresh confrontation with life. These works demonstrate the artist's own self-perception as the one able to create spaces for reconciliation and compassion. Miller is an alchemical dreamer who is investigating the myths of his own evolution as an imaginative being and who is rebuilding that awareness towards a world rich in a sense of belonging. In these dreams there is an invitation to wake up to life with a richer appreciation of the felt world of relations. This is a sensual world that is also numinous in character, visionary in trajectory and playful in its fullest expression of human freedom. These works remind us that in a post 9/11 world there are limits to the fashions of irony in post-modern culture and that there is a place for images to offer a territory of visionary reflection that sustains the creative hope of human compassion. Rod Pattenden is the Director of the Institute for Theology and the Arts Sydney, Australia.
Paul Miller
PAUL MILLER
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