STEVE MILLER ROOTS

September 16 ­ October 25, 2009

The Robin Rice Gallery announces "Roots", a solo exhibition of 14 digital X-ray images by artist and photographer Steve Miller. The opening reception will be held on September 16th, 2009. The show runs through October 25th.

While all photography arrests motion, it is only the X-ray that allows us to climb inside a particular moment and subject and parse the structure of its beauty from within. Steve Miller’s X-ray photographs, 13 black and white carbon on cotton prints and 1 glass plate mounted on steel, do the trick. Miller’s work lifts the lid off a hidden domain, revealing the stilled and remarkable innards of things we pass by every day.

Orchid bulbs perch on lacy roots, music thrums from a plucked string, a foot punches a ball into the air. Miller removes plants, musical instruments, and soccer balls from their usual context and fixes them under the omniscient, scrutinizing eye of the digital X-ray. The inner world rises to the outer. Smoky, ethereal tulips bend, mid-wilt; seeds nestle within nearly invisible pods; the guitar’s translucent body rests in its case, snug as if in an ancient sarcophagus. Miller distills all action, feeling, and process so that only the essential remains, and in carefully rendered black, white, and film-noir gray, the essential is both clinical and glamorous.

What was hidden is now revealed, and the empty space within his subjects speaks to their potential fullness. At the same time, that new vision brings with it an unsettling awareness of our own inner workings, our fundamental material essence, and ultimately, our human susceptibility to the processes of time.

In the past 25 years, Steve Miller has presented 31 solo exhibitions at major institutions in the United States, China, France, and Germany. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ArtForum, ARTnews, and Art in America. Miller was one of the first artists to experiment with computers in the early 1980’s, and his work today continues to integrate science and technology with fine art. This is his first solo show of photography.