Upcoming Exhibitions

October 17 - November 30

San Luis Obispo Museum of Art

San Luis Obispo, California

November 7 - December 15

Building Bridges Art Foundation

Bergamot Station

Los Angeles, California

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I did not come to art. Art came to me and has provided a conduit to make emotion and aesthetics physical. Through various experiences and mediums, art was distilled into my consciousness. I became aware of its impact and felt the desire to see internal visions manifested in order to purge the held aesthetic emotion when the work is complete. Ordinary objects revealed alternative realities that demanded exploration.

Photography was the beginning. This medium gave depth to sight. In time the photos wanted to leap from the walls and become dimensional. Sculpture which displaces space became the new form. New pieces evolved from the remnants of the last and the process continues.

Bruce Miller

Eye-opener: Atascadero artist Bruce Miller displays abstract works at SLOMA

By Jessica Pena

Bruce Miller has been a museumgoer for nearly all his life. In fact, ask him about an artist and he’ll recount his or her works and talents with an encyclopedic ease. From Da Vinci to O’Keeffe to whoever it was who carved into ice 10,000 years ago, Miller not only relishes the history of art, but the purity and the practice of it. When he was 20 years old, he encountered his first museum exhibit. The artist in question was Francis Bacon. Now, 50 years later, the Atascadero-based artist’s sculptures, photography, and paintings are the subject of their own exhibit—Abstract Realities—at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art.

“When you walk into a museum,” he said as we moved among his newly installed pieces, “you have to open yourself to the masterpieces.”

Openness is the key term, because as you walk into this museum and see the diverse pieces Miller has to offer, they command your engagement. A metallic beam hangs from above, a blue glove holds a blue phone, and a tower of interlocking aluminum tubes stands just in front of a vast painting of splattered white, blue, yellow, and red. If this all seems a little chaotic, step a little closer. Things won’t become clearer, but the view will certainly change.

Miller’s works benefit from this kind of intimate interaction: walking up close and really looking into the contours, shapes, colors, and reflections of each sculpture, photograph, or painting. Approach one of his many alluring aluminum etchings and, at first, you’ll notice a basic pattern. Some are circular; some are rectangular; some are a combination of both. But lean in, stare a little harder, and you’ll see the object light up with intricacies and labyrinthine lines that shift and transform at every angle. It’s a hypnotizing effect that results from meticulous craftsmanship.

For his sculptures, Miller prefers to work with aluminum.

“It’s light, easy to cut, and responds well,” he explained.

Sometimes, he has a singular vision. For the etchings, at least, he draws the design first, then processes it into a physical object. But for the most part, Miller’s pieces evolve out of themselves. What began as one solitary rectangular tube grew into 221 rectangular tubes stacked into an impressive pillar. And what was once only remnant metal from another sculpture turned, in Miller’s hands, into its own polished work of art.

“Every piece is its own,” he said, “and they are really the result of an emotion that I have tried to make physical.”

That strong, sensory impetus can be seen in Miller’s paintings and photographs as well, which speak to the same kind of emotional and organic process as the aluminum monoliths. Using sticks instead of brushes, Miller drizzles sturdy European house paint on flat surfaces with what appears to be reckless abandon. The lines seem haphazard; the colors are vivid, but not always immediately complimentary. But, again, a step a little closer to the canvas yields familiar scenes: a set of clouds and a possible skyline. There’s freedom in this medium that Miller prefers to something more tedious.

“Painting is the joy; sculpture is obsessive,” he said. “If you can align the movement of the application of the paint to the space in you when you’re not thinking anymore, it’s completely liberating.”

Even if Miller finds the process behind painting to be more freeing than that of sculpture or photography, his opinions don’t diminish the works’ openness for the viewer. What unites such seemingly disparate pieces as a photographic triptych of sugared cereal, a futuristic-looking series of metallic tubes, and a painting of freeform lines is precisely their lack of connection. Each piece stands on its own as a evocative portal, open to any interpretation, with no background story or recognizable image necessary. That’s a liberating experience in and of itself—like painting is for Miller.

“There’s no destination; it’s always the same,” he said. “You connect with that emotion, that remembrance, something that impacts you, and you try to explore it. … There is no narrative. Man has this incredible need to reproduce what he sees … and alter it ever so slightly.”

Source: New Times - http://www.newtimesslo.com/art/11581/eyeopener-atascadero-artist-bruce-miller-displays-abstract-works-at-sloma/

BRUCE MILLER: FORCE OF INVENTION

By Peter Frank

Bruce Miller’s artwork, realized in two and three dimensions, explores the interaction of form and color through combinations of standard and unorthodox means. Such an approach results in structures and images whose skewed conventionality, recognizable and strange at once, is often more startling than an entirely eccentric object would be. Elegant as they might be, Miller’s sculptures, assemblages, and photographs refuse to conform to expectations – the kinds of expectations a century or more of modernist invention have secured in Western aesthetic discourse – even as they seem grounded in precisely those expectations. Neither, however, do they seem jokey or clever; they can be humorous, but they are free of knowing, arrogant snark. Miller is no post-modernist wit playing with convention in order to dissolve it, but a genuine enthusiast taking apart the components of modernism and putting them back together in ways that honor the spirit of the original but – also in the spirit of the original – are prevented from imitation by the sheer force of invention. In his search for beauty, Miller, a true neo-modernist, may emulate, but he cannot imitate.

What kind of beauty does Miller seek? It is a beauty that inheres to the art object itself, an elegance and poise that, at least at first, charms rather than overwhelms but guiles even as it presents itself with a kind of modesty. The self-possession of these structures and images comes naturally, but ultimately serves to bring one’s eyes in rather than keep them at a distance. The apparently alterable segments of several works would seem to propose audience participation without in fact relying on such participation: the apparent modularity of their components gives them an implied kinesis that their reflective response to light only enhances. Finally, though, to our eyes these sculptures are not machines whose movement has been thwarted, but ideas about the architectural presences whose dynamism has been arrested – or, more to the point, has plateaued at a kind of formal stasis. They have reached their logical point of rest.

Dramatic and elegant, Miller’s sculptures also allow for an element of surprise, and even comic relief. They often seem to have evolved out of – or in the process of evolving toward – the elaborate, even fevered architecture that science fiction illustrators of the mid-20th century projected for the distant future, or for distant planetary civilizations. The sensitive, sometimes literally spectacular effects Miller coaxes from his objects with strategically placed light only enhance this association. But such suggestion never determines, much less overwhelms, our apprehension of the sculptures. They are clearly not “about the future,” but about the possibilities of the present. Similarly, they are not about the past’s idea of the future, but they do build on a mid-century aesthetic. Without reiterating the forms and devices of Op art, kinetic art, and other dazzling artistic phenomena of the 1960s (and Miller’s own youth), the restrained but radiant and playful sculptures recapture something of the effervescence associated with the perceptual experimentation of that era, and with that era itself.

For all that, Miller’s three-dimensional works do not feel sourced in a rekindled aesthetic, much less in nostalgic recollection. They show their roots, but they grow in their own fashion, and manifest the sober, if restless and clever, attitude of their maker. Miller’s photography explores light in similar fashion – although his approach to the conjuration of imagery in photographic terms is even more reliant on light as a subject, and as a medium. This would seem natural to an artistic form whose very name betrays its reliance on light; but Miller makes us acutely aware of that fact, fabricating luminous images whose details, no matter how exacting in their verism (as in his still lifes) or luscious in their color (as in his abstract photographs),  seem fashioned in and even of light itself.

Bruce Miller has fashioned his art from means and materials we readily associate with artmaking, and specifically with art made as part of the modernist discourse. This discourse has maintained even over an era that has looked skeptically on such practice. But such practice, ever serious, has returned to mainstream artistic scrutiny. From the disaffection and dissolution of post-modernism, a neo-modernism has arisen that has prompted artists both old enough and too young to recall the almost-magical concepts of late modernism, but certainly aware enough to regard the museum-preserved landmarks of early and high modernism as masterpieces. If it is the technically experimental spirit of late modernism that neo-modernists such as Miller wish to renew, it is the resonance and dignity of earlier modernism they aspire to. If Miller’s method is playful, his spirit is something more.

Los Angeles, October 2014