Anthony Miler

WITNESS

May 22 - July 2, 2021

CHECKLIST AVAILABLE HERE

 The Pit is pleased to present WITNESS, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by New York-based Anthony Miler.  On view from May 22 – July 3 2021, with a socially-distanced public reception from 2-5pm on Saturday May 22nd, this exhibition consists of five new oil paintings that undulate between figuration and abstraction, as cycloptic eyes animate flat picture planes demarcated by bulbous black waves.

WITNESS implies an ethics of care in communities, a social responsibility as reflex, in which observation and active engagement leads to understanding, sensitivity, safety, and evolution. While Miler says that the act of painting can make one feel like an “alien from outer space who’s still learning to be human,” these paintings are not satirically voyeuristic commentaries on malicious potentials of surveillance. Miler considers them more as biomorphic landscapes in which eye—figuration offers a “chance of narrative” to flip playfully back and forth between objecthood and pictorialism. In other words, the eyes are objects but they’re also flat symbols — glyphs — they’re not biologically accurate. Even as representations, they still give these paintings “agency,” as the artist says, by virtue of “a feeling and attraction to figurative work, a psychological awareness, a conscience behind that eyeball.” With bird’s eye-views, these paintings are personified somewhat, but eyes in this case are ultimately magical symbols. Cosmic dilated pupils connote curiosity and absorption, bulls-eye targets, peepholes, evil-eye repellent charms — vortices where focused, generous interaction concentrates and vibrates. As scale-shifting devices, these diminutive peepers lend the black shapes populating these compositions something close to moiré: a disorienting vibration. This illusion of immensity snaps the canvases back into sublime landscape mode; maybe this makes the paintings a new kind of transcendental Op-Art?

Miler’s blackbirds are actually Prussian blue, and mark a distinct shift in material use for the artist. Previously, Miler precisely stained canvases then over-painted with oil pigments mixed with acrylic & water, creating “high-risk environments” that didn’t allow for mistakes. However, the new paintings in Witness archive line and shape in more forgiving ways: through copious layers of ground pigments sealed with acrylic medium so that surfaces achieve soft depth and luster, like sanded, unpolished alabaster. These new works mark a return to a more traditional painting style, one that involves oil paint applied on top of a treated surface rather than staining unprimed canvas.  Notably, this series varies greatly from others in Miler’s oeuvre; he also makes wildly gestural graphite drawings on raw canvas more in conversation with Abstract Expressionism and CoBrA than with the exacting graphic lineation happening here. Miler nurtures multiple practices that are highly variable, to widen painting and drawing skills through challenges inherent to each series. If this Blue Bird suite is viewed through a wide-lens regarding Miler’s overall practice, these paintings that embrace similarity and repetition paradoxically become slick reminders that stylistic shifts are non-linear, concurrent, and frequently high-contrast, despite artists’ chronologies being oversimplified in art history books. In this, his “desire to speak to deeper time frames” is not just about this specific body of work’s keen ability to swell and wobble between ancient and contemporary modes, but about establishing a lifelong relationship with painting that can grow and flow freely, driven by material enjoyment and a desire for constant metamorphosis.

Inquiries please email info@the-pit.la