|
George Bures Miller Simple Experiments in Aerodynamics: 6 & 7 Main Gallery Sept 10 - Oct 31, 1998 |
|
|
As an artist, Bures Miller is an interpreter, understanding the dynamic nature of intermedia work as a whole. The work is decidedly technical and logical. Bures Miller's work begins with organizing and cataloguing materials. The crucial process takes papers, notes, drawings, video footage and other documents out of the category of the unstructured and raw and gives them an intellectual framework to come to terms with language and preconceptions of the unique exchange that is, in the end, the infrastructure for the experiential process. The resulting visual experience and residual images are neither mechanical nor passive, less involved with describing the perceptual world than concerned with reorganizing it and building a basis for multiple interpretations or possibilities. A sense of potential and imminent danger are front and center as the sculptures appear, at least initially, uncontrollable, apparently, beyond the quasi-scientific control of the artist. One is conscious of the artist's presence and his role in maintaining knowledge, order and clarity amidst faux chaos. The experiential in the intermedia work of Bures Miller is built on the interpretation and production of loss, loneliness and uncertainty. The experiments above are occasionally tinged with fear. This is partly achieved through Miller's creation of an agitated state in the viewer. Just as intermedia works in general may leverage dynamic change by occupying spaces between media, the visceral, experiential elements common to the Imbalance series occupy similar spaces between panic and euphoria, between terror and self-confidence ÜÜ the flip flopping of sentiments commonly associated with experiencing a state of imbalance in a darkened room. For example, Imbalance .3 features a simple three-bulb lighting system, a stubby chandelier without ornamentation, that follows a 33 foot track of cable (its length is variable; its placement in the room more critical). The lighting unit runs back and forth along the cable at a rapid rate until suddenly, at seemingly irregular intervals, the unit stops abruptly on its cable track. The three-bulb chandelier swings back and forth erratically for several seconds before coming to rest, then suddenly it lurches again, swinging from one end of the cable track to the other. What could be implied in the stark glare of the light and its passage through this dimly lit space?
|
The sustained tension in the piece can be traced to filmic sources that constantly shift and pull a sense of the present moment from the past and the future. "STOP THE PROJECTOR. CUT THE CURRENT. EXTINGUISH THE PROJECTION LAMP. THE MAGUS PROCLAIMS: TIME MUST HAVE A STOP. What is the Present? It is nothing more than a point upon the line of Time, where the infinite Future is separated from the infinite Past." 2 The effects of jumping shadows and a menacing cacophony of sound along a defined line of jerky movements and pauses (or derailments of reason) triggering a reminder of the present -- isn't that what Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles gave us in abundance? Bures Miller's ongoing interest in science fiction's stock-in-trade of futuristic, bizarre phenomena also provides some insight. Bures Miller spends countless hours ordering and providing for the physical well-being of the experiments with an intimate knowledge of the fragmentary and deceptive nature of his evidence. As in a filmic experience, the agitated state of the viewer is a prerequisite and Bures Miller replicates the conditions for this experience in the semi-darkness of a white cube. What is demanded is not the calm of a quiet room to elicit contemplation, but the sensory experience of the best dramatic film whose juxtaposing of visual cues and sound in a semi-dark room can become a calculated interstice between sustained tension and psychic paradigm shift. If some residue of the filmic experience informs the work of George Bures Miller it is a particular sensibility unconcerned with mainstream dramatic film's linear narrative structure and moreso, aligned with the limitless potential in the genre of science fiction with its shattered narratives, special effects and the critical evisceration of progress. What Bures Miller so effectively mines is the experiential, further stripping it down and transferring its residue to new intermedia sculptural forms. Bures Miller's experiments in aerodynamics have less to do with formal experiments in engineering or science that aim to quantify and reproduce the certainty of results and more to do with replicating the experiential that doggedly avoids explanation as easily as it enlightens.
Wayne Baerwaldt
Notes Text edited by Sarah Cook, Melanie Townsend and Cheryl Smith
|
|
|
Image: George Bures Miller #6 (Escapre Velocity), 1998 mixed media with compressed air, pneumatic pistons, electronic circuit
|
George Bures Miller has recently collaborated with Janet Cardiff to exhibit at the Morris Healy Gallery, New York and the Raum Aktueller Kunst, Vienna. Miller has also had solo exhibitions at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Galerie Clark, Montreal and Plug In Gallery in Winnipeg. His work has also been included in such group
exhibitions as Press / Enter at the Power Plant, Toronto and in the Chaos Never Died exhibition, Seattle, Washington. Miller currently lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta.
|
|