GREG MILLER: FLASHBACKS

GREG MILLER

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

FLASHBACKS

FLASHBACKS On the occasion of William Turner Gallery’s thirtieth anniversary, it is with great pleasure to conclude the observance with the gallery’s inaugural artist, Greg Miller by presenting “FLASHBACKS.” Contextually within the framework of postmodern Neo-pop and Post-pop, Miller utilizes a semiotic process of mining familiar pictorial codes from the popular culture of his youth for his visual vocabulary. Through his examination of sign systems, the modality of their transmission, as well as methods of production, Miller constructs paradoxes of the collective appointments awarded to the conventional iconography of post-war America. Informed by a uniquely ‘California’ lens, his gaze assembles a complex of interwoven images and text, high and low culture, with allegorical references to labor, leisure and Capitalism in medium and process.

With “FLASHBACKS,” Miller binarily indexes the polemics of “universal literacy,” while considering the problematic nuances of cultural relativism.

Parsing his canvases is to unpack ethnographic maps which not only survey the landscape of industrialized Americana, but additionally addresses the global reach of what some have interpreted as cultural imperialism, others as soft diplomacy. Richly laced with irony and humor, Miller exploits the spectacle and banality of mass culture in an eclectic pastiche void of overt social commentary.

In his strategies involving the appropriated image, Miller paints and airbrushes rendered quotations of cowboys and glamazons amidst an assemblage of photographs and text from newspapers and magazines. The overlapping layers of archived prints are accretively assembled and embalmed as inclusions below a capsule of crystalline resin.

Beginning in the 1940’s, “Glassing” surfboards with resin became a process of waterproofing and finishing employed by Southern California’s professional surfboard shapers and appropriated

by Miller.

Cultural relativism applies not only to geographic boundaries but generational and economic intersectionalities.

“FLASHBACKS” canvases afford materials new lives in a transformative process of negotiating the radically shifting cultural constructs of contemporary social morés and recontextualizes them, provoking questions on our relationship with the images we consume.

Greg Miller was born in 1951 in Sacramento, California. His work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation. The Get Go, a volume of his writings, photography and paintings, was published in 2010, and the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Signs of the Nearly Actual, was published in 2009.

Miller’s investigation of materials associated with Venice, California’s surf, car and graffiti cultures introduced mediums and techniques he continues to incorporate.

(Detail) Cool Man, 2021 Acrylic and collage on canvas 48” x 48”

FLASHBACKS, 2021, mixed media, collage, on canvas, 66” x 98”

I’m a contemporary cave-painter. I wanted to paint about the 50’s and 60’s because that’s when I grew up. I top paintings on top of paintings, on top of paintings and then I dig into them later like an archaeologist.

-Greg Miller

American, 2021, acrylic, collage, paper on canvas, 60”x48”

Casper Brindle Light-Glyph III 2021 Pigmented acrylic 74” x 44” x 12”

I used to go to these old western towns with my grandmother, like Bodie, California; they didn’t have wallpaper and so they would put up cans on the walls and old Sears catalogs. I liked the repetitive culture and information that was in front of me, I liked the randomness of it all.

-Greg Miller

Eyefull 2021, acrylic and collage on canvas 48”x48”

I try to find things in our culture like an old billboard, because living in California when I did, there were all of these billboards across the landscape.

It would be of a woman holding up a can of coke but it would be all ripped and the other sign would be coming through below.

-Greg Miller

Good 2021, acrylic and collage on canvas 48”x48”

I do comic book characters because people relate to comic books. There’s a thing about comic books that are sort of generalized and they’re hand drawn and kind of primitive but they’re hand done and I like that.

-Greg Miller

Cool Man 2021 Acrylic and collage on canvas 48” x 48”

Her Hideaway 2021, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 48”x48”

GREG MILLER Drawing on the cultural and geographic influences of his California roots, Greg Miller explores images of the American urban and rural landscape of the mid-twentieth century.

The work grabs us nostalgically, rousing a shared cultural memory, but also teaches something of their lingering pull on contemporary perception.

Labeled a “neo-pop” and “post-pop” artist by such critics as Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank, Miller does indeed draw from the pop-cultural imagery that saturated American consciousness during the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was a time during which advertising and text became indelibly encrypted into our experience of everyday life. Life as “advertised” and life as “lived” were insuperably intertwined on the pages of “LIFE” and “LOOK” magazines, on television shows, commercials, billboards, hotel signs, romance novels and even matchbook covers as never before. Miller’s paintings excavate this imagery and often appear as unreconstructed fragments of these signs, drips, patterns and phrases.

These form the layers of Miller’s pop cultural imagery, both literally and figuratively.

Greg Miller’s work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation. The Get Go, a volume of his writings, photography and paintings, was published in 2010, and the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Signs of the Nearly Actual, was published in 2009

Photography: Rob Brander Design: Rob Brander Introduction: Reina Flynn Copyright Greg Miller & William Turner Gallery 2022

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY