Various Small Fires is pleased to present Imaginary Interventions by American artist John Miller (b. 1954, Cleveland, Ohio). This exhibition of nine new works on canvas plus a vinyl wall graphic will mark the artist’s first solo presentation in Seoul. As an artist, writer, curator, and musician, Miller consistently takes a multidisciplinary approach to question, subvert, and reveal the nature of everyday life. Miller’s most notable introduction to the Korean audience was through Mannequin Lover, male mannequin included in the 2010 Gwangju Biennale. By inviting the Biennale’s curators and staff to dress the mannequin in their clothing, the artist investigated relationships that bind people to images and images to people.
Imaginary Interventions is a collection of photomontaged images photographed from various sites in the city of Berlin, specifically between the hours of noon and 2 pm. These works are an extension of the artist’s Middle of the Day series, an ever-growing photographic archive of images of public and private spaces that Miller presents as ‘socially produced sites.’ In the VSF exhibition lumpy impastos of burnt sienna acrylic paint interrupt the otherwise nondescript photographic images. Brown impasto serves as a signature of sorts for the artist—a grotesque personal touch or index.
A city-specific architecture resembling a honeycomb with multiple courtyards in Molar Multiplicities, an abandoned discotheque with a dangling disco ball by the river in The Chariot of Death and an unrecognizable pathway leading to an unknown place in Chimera. From different shapes of circles and rows of squares to words like ‘NO’ in capitalized letters, Miller superimposes brown blocks of impasto over the printed image to imply an intervention in the photographic plane. In The Reflection, two different images are a digital integration that creates an illusion of a singular site.
