VSF proudly announces Total Presence, John Miller’s (b. 1954, Cleveland, OH) first solo at our Los Angeles space. Total Presence centers on a new series of trompe l’oeil paintings with squares of Miller’s signature burnt sienna impasto floating over banal yet intriguing photographic montages of urban surfaces and landscapes. Alongside these recent works are Miller’s 2020 video, The Trip, and an immersive installation, An Illusion of an Illusion (2024). This selection, by looping the viewer through a sequence of effects raging from haptic shock to hypnotically banal, captures conflicting feelings that arise from the overwhelming compulsion to consume products, media, and images up to and beyond the point of pleasure.
Grounded in photo montages of the urban landscape shot in New York, Berlin, and Seoul, Miller’s trompe l’oeil paintings have a simple premise: superimposing brown shapes over photos of public space. Miller started these works in 1999 as a series of lightboxes that reimagined his older brown paintings and sculptures as public works. In this, Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments and Robert Smithson’s drawings inspired him. Three years later, the near uniform critical rejection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” drew Miller’s attention, prompting him to start making trompe l’oeil works. Yet, in these, Miller also draws from Cubist montage.
Miller composes his trompe l’oeil paintings from photographs of various surfaces shot straight on. He adds squares with drop shadows that suggest volume and texture to these. Finally, he paints the area within the squares. He notes, “I was going for a haptic emphasis on surface and a collision of heterogeneous surfaces reflecting the sensory shock of urban environments.” Miller took the titles for most of these paintings from critics’ and art historians’ descriptions of tromple l’oeil effects. The titles are somewhat redundant -- but somehow poetic.
On the way in or out of the main gallery, viewers will find An Illusion of an Illusion in our &Milk space: a wall-sized photo-montage combining images of Seoul and New York City. The scale of the work, along with its imagery, conflates indoor and outdoor space. The printed vinyl graphic also doesn’t quite reach the gallery’s ceiling, so while it is nearly life-size, it is not entirely immersive. It’s more like a large billboard. Like the trompe l’oeil works, An Illusion... plays with a tension between theatrical artifice and realism. The center of the mural represents various flat surfaces: a reproduced painting in a storefront, part of a door, and a parking meter. On the left, you see a Seoul street scene; on the right, a blurry street scene from Lower Manhattan in which the Odeon appears. Then, further to the right is a former FedEx storefront with the sign “We’ve moved” and another view of Seoul behind it.
As a foil to the paintings’ many competing elements, Miller’s video, The Trip, is mesmerizing. A male mannequin dressed in a cheap grey suit slowly rotates against a monochrome background. The camera gradually zooms in on the mannequin while the background colors slowly shift. A male voice intones the phrase, “I’m spinning around, spinning around, spinning around again.” The spinning and the phrase become ever slower. The last sentence -- now spoken at normal speed -- is different: “I’m spinning around, my friend.” Slick and languorous, The Trip is an engrossing experience writ in the language of the mall.
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John Miller (b.1954, Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist, writer, curator, and musician based in New York and Berlin. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and received an MFA. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979.
Most recently, Miller was the subject of a thirty-year survey of his work at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland. He has also had solo institutional exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Museum im Bellpark, Kriens; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Zürich; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble; and the Kunstverein Hamburg.
Miller participated in the 1985 and 1991 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials and the 2010 Gwangju Biennale. He has participated in group exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; CAPC Musée D’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and MoMA PS1, New York. His works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Rubell Family Collection; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Ludwig and more.
Miller’s criticism has appeared in Artforum, October, and Texte zur Kunst. JRP and Les Presses du Réel have published compilations of his writing as The Price Club: Selected Writings, 1977-1996 and The Ruin of Exchange. Miller is currently a Professor of Professional Practice in Art History at Barnard College.
