Pop Culture Inspires Art at Ink Shop’s “Casino”

By Arthur Whitman

Ribbons and cones; rounded, stonelike shapes; jagged spiky stars — all dance and shout within the hectic, ambiguous spaces of Erin Miller’s recent mixed-technique print collages. Brushed and marbled textures add to the vertiginous feeling, keeping the viewer continuously off-balance. Bright colors, bordering on the garish, intertwine with more somber and restrained hues.

Miller, a 2022 Cornell University M.F.A. graduate, is based in Ithaca and Houston, Texas. She is the 2022–2023 Kahn Family Fellow at The Ink Shop Printmaking Center. An exhibition concluding her residency, “Erin Miller: Casino,” (February 3 through March 22) currently fills the Shop’s modest two-room gallery-studio space. The show — with one important exception — consists of moderately sized pieces variously combining screenprint, monotype, paper marbling and collage. She porary art alike — of taking inspiration from popular culture. As she writes in a statement, her current work draws feeling from “sites of entertainment like casinos, honky-tonks and arcades.” In particular, she cites the carpeting of gambling houses, with their calculated use of sensory disorientation and their linking of “chance and control.”

One can certainly imagine a sinister element behind Miller’s self-evident joie de vivre, perhaps a cautionary tale about the dangers of compulsion and excess. Still, this is not cynically kitschy or politically driven work.

This viewer at least thinks more of Matisse than casino flooring: the simplified heraldic shapes of his late cutouts repeated and overlain to a point of dizzy euphoria. Or the use of collage in an abstract expressionist context by Lee Krasner and others. Or the work of long-time Ink Shop stalwart (and 1977 Cornell M.F.A.) Kumi Korf — whose intertwinings of collaboration between Cornell Human Ecology professor — and Ink Shop member — Melissa Conroy, musician and electronic sound artist Anthony Dicembre and several other Cornellians. The show (which runs through March 10) occupies the Jill Stuart Gallery in the university’s Human Ecology building. has chosen to present these, alternatingly, framed and pinned directly to the wall.

The artist makes her interest explicit in “Bouba and Kiki (1–6),” a series of framed upright yellow and black pieces combining marbled paper and collage. The stark twotone is odds with the delicacy traditionally associated with paper marbling as well as the coloristic overload elsewhere in this show. “Bouba” is evoked indirectly in the melting striations of the marbling while the spiked “Kiki” stars are camouflaged, creating a strange sensation — like being pulled while underwater.

Back to the Ink Shop. Relatively large, the wide-format “Casino I” and “Casino II,” (both unframed) lack collage, giving them a flatter, less immediately tactile feeling. A central silhouetted form, resembling a pot or urn, is repeated in each, as is the all-over brushy cursive texture. Only the colors shift noticeably: with pale pink, crimson and magenta dominating the cooler colors in “I” and teal and emerald green coming more to the fore in “II.” The diptych plays with abstract pattern as camouflage and more broadly with how we register concealment and disclosure in our perception of the world. Like everything else here, they are also lovely to look at.

Named after the late H. Peter Kahn (1921–1997) — painter-printmaker, Cornell professor and polymath — the Kahn Family Fellowship offers emerging print or book artists the opportunity to develop their work within the setting of an independent communal print studio and exhibition space.

(Applications for the 2023–24 fellowship are due March 24. See ink-shop.org for details.)

Although abstract, Miller’s work here partakes in the tradition — common to high modernist and postmodern/contem- brushy calligraphy and hard-edge shapes echo uncannily here.

Miller is interested in the psychology of perception: particularly in the synesthetic merger of sight, sound and tactile sensation latent in our embodied experience. Central to the iconography (as it were) of her recent work are shapes illustrative of the so-called bouba/kiki effect. The ongoing research project strongly indicates an association — culturally universal (or nearly so) — between words as sound patterns and abstract shapes. While “bouba” is readily identifiable as the rounded, bloblike form, diverse subjects recognize “kiki” as the spiked figure.

Though perhaps the most irresolute piece here, “Runner” deserves credit for its ambition. Covering a long corner shelf near the entrance of the Shop, it combines a stuffed, pillow-like support with pinned and stitched-on paper and fabric embellishments. The piece belongs to the tradition of soft sculpture, intended to challenge sculptural tradition with evocations of feminine craft and of soft and perishable bodies.

Viewers interested in learning more about the soft sculpture genre, or in synesthetic art, would do well to climb the hill to see “Phantom Limb.” The ambitious interactive exhibit represents an evolving

“Casino” is the Ink Shop’s first new show of the year. Although their upcoming exhibitions have not been announced, as of this writing, seasoned local gallerygoers will know to expect a diverse, well-thought-out calendar with local and far-flung print artists working in a range of techniques and styles.

“Casino” by Erin Miller

Tues.-Fri: 1-6, Sat.: noon-4 through March 22

The Ink Shop Printmaking Center & Olive Branch Press 330 East State/MLK Jr. Street ink-shop.org or (607) 277-3884