All Images and text copyright Katie Miller 2013. All rights reserved.
Press Release for 'Is
Realism Relevant?', 'The Fancy of Babes' at Conner Contemporary:
written by Jamie L.
Smith, Ph.D
September 10 - October 22, 2011
Is Realism Relevant? Conner Contemporary Art enthusiastically says ‘YES’ with three concurrent solo exhibitions featuring new works by Erik Thor Sandberg, Nathaniel Rogers and Katie Miller. Six centuries after Flemish oil painting branded the early modern age, each of these DC area artists maximizes his or her command of the realist technique to express the human condition in contemporary life. Engagement with current issues imbues these painters’ works with the relevance of their own time, while their informed references to artistic precedents casts present situations within a historical perspective. With its world class Old Master museum collections, Washington is a natural home for realism. Representational painting began to make a resurgence here in the 1970s, in the wake of the prominent Washington Color abstractionists. Today, Sandberg, Rogers and Miller are at the leading edge of contemporary realism in DC.
Essay by critic and
curator Dominique Nahas:
written for catalog
accompanying my MFA thesis exhibit
Katie Miller’s paintings in her exhibition
InFancy consist of
Little Boy Blue and His Comely
Cremello (2011), Tiny Miss Diva’s
Puppy Style (2011), Equus ferus
cabalus Lascivus (2010), Macaca
silenus Libidinosus (2010), and Rattus
norvegicus Voluptarius (2010). These images attract us and repel us
equally. This double movement is due in large part to the artist’s
fastidious painterly style that demands close viewing as well as from afar.
Miller, fascinated by the connotations of what she terms “animal
breeding, adornment, love or lust,” creates works that give us access to her
susceptibilities as an artist. Sharply attuned to formal nuances whether
they are in the realm of color, or shape, or line or subject matter she has
explores the arenas of excess, decadence, uncontrolled metamorphosis, and
artificiality. She is attentive to aberrations, hybridity, abnormal
behavioral psychology, social pathologies, behavioral psychology, and
evolutionary biology. She is fascinated by dog shows and child beauty
pageants. Miller is compelled to
ask questions about the nature/culture divide as she ponders the ins and
outs (and the no-exits) of the nurture/nature debate that centers on
differing debates about the socialization process. Towards that end Miller
paints with astonishing mimetic exactitude in her new work as she goes about
shuffling the natural order in her interrogation of differences, limits, and
of the impossible.
It is evident in looking at her fantasy paintings that Miller is a
perceptive observer and evaluator, that she loves to tell stories and that
she is incurably curious and wondering. She is fascinated by fetishism,
consumer fetishism in particular, and how sexuality is embodied and
projected in how we pitch toys to children as well. Sometimes Miller has
observed toys are given “looks” that are meant to insinuate. The paintings
of Katie Miller point to her fascinations with how, as a youth-driven
culture, advanced Western culture pictures children, how they are sexualized
and made into our own adult image. There is a weird queasy pedophilic
eroticism that permeates this work, not a small reason why Miller’s “prostitot”
image-constructions are at once within the realm of eerily recognizable
fantasy and yet removed from it as well. The works are conceivable and
inconceivable as animals and children preen and shimmy with the heat of
meretricious languor and of overripe sexual promiscuousness. It is perhaps
for all these reasons that her work is so compellingly twisted.
Katie
Miller’s paintings work on us because while we might concede that an ethical
dimension courses through the artist’s intentionalities in the making of her
art we don’t feel that Miller works from an assumption that that the artist
and her public are in prior agreement as to what moral stance should be
taken towards the subjects addressed. Miller doesn’t take the viewer’s
sympathy for granted and doesn’t engage in special pleading on behalf of her
work or the position she takes vis-a-vis her subject matter. Instead she
puts us in the uncomfortable situation of not quite knowing what to think of
her provocations.
The artist’s social and psychological caricatures in
Little Boy Blue and His Comely
Cremello and Tiny Miss Diva’s
Puppy Style do not depend on the florid deformations or overt
attenuations of elastic body parts as in the works of John Currin, or Lisa
Yuskavage. Instead Miller treats
her subjects with cool control and diffidence more along the lines of Nir
Hod’s recent “genius” paintings in which he examines the romantic visual
tropes out of which our cultural constructions of what constitutes “the
prodigy look” emerges. In Miller’s two large paintings the artist brings us
scenarios that are nightmarish in their implications. The innocence of the
child that defines the normative child has been replaced by an adult
consciousness of sexuality and desire. This seemingly compromised boy and
girl inhabit natural settings that hold the disenchanted promise of
normative woodland perversions and rural horrors. In such surroundings the
demonic image of domesticated animals signified by the pet dog and horse has
also been cannily visually de-centered. It is as if these beasts have been
so un-bestialized so as to embody human desiring-drives that are in turn
aided and abetted by meretricious vanity and toxic self-conscious
narcissism.
It is in the interplay of the small alterations and minute
transpositions in her details work that are used so judiciously throughout
her sturdily realistic mimetic renditions of human and animal bodies in
place and space that triggers our mounting anxiety.
These are the “hooks” that really get to us: the French manicure on
the claws of the Yorkshire Terrier, the blue-beribboned underwear of the
little boy’s tightie-whitees, the curl of his right toe, the quivering
tranny mouth of the little girl.
And on and on. Out of this
disquiet we as viewers find ourselves in the throes of Nietzschean laughter
of which Georges Bataille speaks: “To see tragic characters and
to be able to laugh, despite the
profound understanding, emotion and sympathy that we feel: this is divine.”
New York City
April 25, 2011
Artist Statement for Work 2005-2010:
“Pictures of children are at once the most common, the most sacred, and the most
controversial images of our time.” – Ann Higonnet (Pictures of Innocence. Thames
and Hudson:1998)
Simultaneous contradictions - qualities which seem to be opposite yet somehow
coexist - draw me to the imagery of childhood. I am interested in combined
feelings of discomfort and familiarity, and in how a picture of a child can be
both utterly mundane and disturbingly surreal. What happens when presumed
innocence is twisted with a willful sense of knowing, or when the provocateur
and the victim are the same? How can a child be both unnervingly creepy and
hauntingly beautiful at the same time?
Newborns, in particular, are full of contradictions. Grotesque, peeling, bruised
and jaundiced flesh covers each tiny, precious body. Writhing, wrinkly, and
ridiculously proportioned, the neonate inhabits an odd time before the cuteness
of babyhood. He appears to be an alien amalgam incorporating elements of the
human fetus, the gawky adolescent, and the frail elderly, yet we adults are
wired to find him appealing. The newborn seems far too odd to be one of us, but
it is the way we all began.
A decade of interest in human-related sciences such as Anthropology, Sociology,
Psychology, and Neuroscience has likely influenced my work. For the past five
years, I’ve been particularly fascinated by the history of childhood as a
concept, and how today, childhood seems to be in a perpetual state of
redefinition with influences from the media, technology, and globalization.
I love the late 15th – early 16th century in European painting when high realism
began to become paramount to the understanding of faith. Holy figures were now
understood in a corporeal, yet idealized fashion. I feel this is mirrored in
today’s secular adoration of children, and our worship of glorified,
sensationalized, and sexualized media images. This is the basis for painting my
figures to be more “real” than reality: so that they are at once artificial,
ethereal, and hyper-human.
- Katie Miller
2010