GREG MILLER: West Wind
The William Turner Gallery is pleased to present, West Wind, an upcoming exhibition of new works by Greg Miller.
West Wind features imagery reminiscent of pulp fiction book covers, continuing Miller’s tradition of expressing timeless Americana themes. While he currently resides in New York, Miller consistently draws on influences of his West Coast roots. Much like many the works presented in this show, Miller states “LA is sexy, mysterious, dangerous”.
Like the Pulp Fiction books of the Mid twentieth century, Greg Miller’s densely collaged works invite viewers to embark upon journeys that are sensational, daring, romantic and heroic. In conjunction with this literary theme, each piece tells its own story. While at first glance the message may seems singular, Miller utilizes text and imagery from various sources to add depth and context that play within and alongside each work’s own narrative. As is so in great literature and in life, there is a buildup and backstory to each piece—no moment exists in a
vacuum. Initially, these works and the stories they tell may seem to take us back in time, grabbing at us nostalgically, and rousing a shared cultural memory, yet they may also teach us 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.