Artist Walkthrough Saturday, November 18th 5:30pm

Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present New Horizon, a selection of works by New York and Berlin-based artist John Miller. This exhibition, the artist's first in Texas, features paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and photo-based works spanning the 1980s to the present. Comprised of various series from a forty-plus-year career, Miller's project critiques systems of representation, commodification, and production, of political and libidinal economies and social relations in the public and private space.

While an integral part of Miller's practice since his early career in the 1980s, painting is the genre Miller has consistently challenged, particularly its inherent associations and reception. Whether ironically quoting styles like regionalist painting or social realism, or using generic imagery from postcards, comic books, or reality TV as subject matter - "pictures of pictures" - or making abstract works in a "surrogate" style, intending to evoke a layman's idea of artistry, Miller remains acutely aware of the implicit culturally-loaded, regressive nature of painting. Hence, he deploys strategies to subvert and destabilize the genre. The current exhibition features an early brown impasto abstract painting, a pedestrian painting, various game show paintings, and new paintings that juxtapose photographic elements with brown impasto forms.

In the 1980s, artist and critic Thomas Lawson argued that, as part of a critique of value in art, the "impetus…was to bring the political agenda of alternative media (i.e. performance, video) back to painting" using it as a veritable "trojan horse," as a rhetorical platform. Untitled (1987), a totem-like abstract painting, is made using what became Miller's "signature" burnt sienna brown, alluding to dirt, excrement, and the human body, "a trademark no one wanted, a repugnant trademark" in the artist's words. The work comments on the abstract expressionist tropes of the ostensibly transcendent art object, the brushstroke, and mark-making as an index of subjectivity and the artwork as the product of artistic mastery.

This early abstract work appears alongside a mandala-like, figurative painting, Learning to Cope (1999). Here, Miller juxtaposes the repeated form of a Price is Right contestant against a blue sky and multicolor pills. This early digitally printed painting, a machine-made work, seemingly eliminates craft and expressive brushstrokes so prominent in the abstract artwork beside it. The political economy of this game, that there is a correct price for every commodity, confronts the prospect of tending to the psyche with religion or drugs.

In Stasis (2017), the depiction of the Price is Right stage highlights the "double staging" inherent in representation. A television screen within a television screen is the focal point of the painting. This nesting calls attention to the subject matter depicted in the painting's illusionistic space and the viewer configured in the real space on the opposite side of the picture plane. This configuration represents a surrogate family - the subject and object of TV technology – the jocular host, his attractive assistants, and the jubilant contestants. Also implicated is the unseen vicarious viewing audience, engrossed in the circulation and accumulation of goods via chance or luck rather than a usual work/labor equation.

Photography manifests itself throughout Miller's oeuvre. His ongoing Middle of the Day project (1994-present) serves as a reservoir of photographic imagery. Often, between the hours of 12 – 2 pm, no matter where he happens to be at that time, Miller shoots a photo, and this has led to an archive of hundreds of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes made in locations worldwide. Here, this imagery appears in graphite drawings based on, at one remove, pictures in this archive.