The Pit is pleased to announce C A P R R I U S, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Allison Miller. This is Miller’s second solo exhibition with The Pit. The exhibition will open with a public reception on Sunday, September 8 from 4-7pm and will remain on view through Saturday, October 19th. The exhibition consists of six new paintings including a large-scale diptych. The dimensions of the large-scale diptych were chosen in order to create an architectural intervention within the gallery, filling the surface of one of the gallery’s walls in its entirety. This most recent group of works represent and expansion of Miller’s ongoing dialog with the history of and possibilities in painting, and has brought new elements into play. In her past works, the ideas of improvisation and contradiction heavily drove their creation — a version of “call and response”. In this new group of paintings, reflection and memory have begun to play an important role in how these compositions were created.

I make paintings that are meant to be experienced as they are made — both intuitively and incrementally. They compress seemingly contradictory moves and elements together, never coming to rest in any one behavior, forming a flexible system that adapts to change. They are accidental and thoroughly intentional works, referencing the interior of the body, physical characteristics, cartoons, landscape and digital space as well as the making of the paintings themselves. The works push thick oil stick, oil paint, transparent layers of acrylic, pencil, collage, controlled lines, smudges and drips together until they condense into an object that couldn’t have been anticipated.

The works in C A P R R I U S share all of these traits and also incorporate more intimate elements than have been included in my work before.

For the past year, I have been processing my mother’s death. Easing back into my own body, brain and paintings all came at the same time. When I began the works in this exhibition, I took all of the objects, clothes, books, notes and letters of hers, which I had brought back to Los Angeles, into the studio with me. I couldn’t look at images of her, but I could look at the things that had surrounded her. The resulting paintings fluidly merge references to her marks and objects (her hand-writing, her sewn designs, patterns from fabric she collected, a silhouette of a book she prized) with the pictorial language I have been developing in my work for years. Neither homage nor dedication, each of these works is an enactment of the bond between my mother and me and my relationship to painting, both.

—AM

Allison Miller (b. Evanston, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her paintings have been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Pit LA, Susan Inglett NYC, The Finley LA, ACME. LA. Group exhibitions include at the Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, Made in LA 2012 at the Hammer Museum, at the Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria, the Orange County Museum of Art, GAVLAK LA, The Pizzuti Collection, Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Orange County Museum of Art, The Pizzuti Collection, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Vassar College and her work has been reviewed by ArtForum, frieze, the Los Angeles Times, Modern Painters, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and Flash Art.