Picturesque Evacuation Ploy

Exhibit dates: October 21 – November 26, 2011

Redux Contemporary Art Center is proud to present Picturesque Evacuation Ploy, a new site-specific installation by visiting artist Liz Miller. Miller will create a large-scale installation in the gallery during a three-week residency from October 1-21, 2011. The public is encouraged to visit the gallery during the installation to view Miller’s process of transforming the gallery space.

Liz Miller is known for her mixed media drawings and large-scale installations. Miller’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. She earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Miller recently received the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists.  She has taught at MSU since 2005, where she is currently Associate Professor of Drawing/Foundations.

Miller’s media installations and drawings recontextualize simplified shapes, signs and symbols from disparate historical and contemporary imagery to create abstract fictions.  Existing forms from a multitude of sources are co-opted, altered, and spliced to adopt hybrid identities.  Through the process of appropriation and subsequent recombination, shapes lose their real-world connotations and take on fictitious roles.  Forged relationships between benign and malignant forms confuse the original implications of each while revealing the precariousness of perception and how easily it can be tampered with.  Recent projects pit pattern and ornament against forms derived from armor and weaponry.  Seemingly oppositional pairings create duplicitous environments where conflicting messages are conveyed.  The use of felt, foam, and other tactile materials further complicates questions of source, masking the identity of forms while allowing them to inhabit both sculptural and two-dimensional space.

About Liz Miller

Liz Miller is a studio artist and educator.  Her works have been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions including: The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (Virginia Beach, VA); Mercer Union (Toronto); The Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs; Haas Gallery, Bloomsburg University (Bloomsburg, PA), Harcourt House Arts Centre (Edmonton) and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  Miller has received awards for her work, including a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants, and a McKnight Foundation Fellowship.  Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Time Out London and is included in two books:  High Touch Visuals (Gestalten, 2007) and Nature: Inspiration for Art & Design (Monsa, 2008). She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She has taught at MSU since 2005, where she is currently Associate Professor of Drawing/Foundations.

Read more about the exhibition in this article by the Charleston City Paper!

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