ASHES/ASHES is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Gerold Miller. The exhibition will be on view February 19 – March 28, 2021 with an opening on Friday, February 19th from 4–8pm. Gallery hours are Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6pm.
This is a room of spatially concerned objects, each discussing and defining their limits internally, in relation to one another — to those that came before and those which will come after — and to the space that houses them. This is a room of monochromatic tones, of blacks as black as the night sky, which retreat to the greyed-white of the eye’s sclera. This is a room of shining surfaces, the finish of a burnished onyx stone. A room of radically definitive definitions with diversity.
Within this room, objects create borders, or barriers, while others present voids — some have been filled in, others engage in total openness — and containment devices composed of themselves. Many objects touch on a number of these elements.
Housed in this room, modernist shamanic staffs adhere to the walls, while another wished to fully alchemise into phenomenological spatiality, allowing itself to distort as it fell from the pictorial support. These considerations — steely lengths, both straight and twisted, both marked by human gesture and flat as perfect industrial shadows — start to define spatial discussions. A recognition of space as extrinsic points to a total understanding of their power as objects, of how their placement articulates the marked space they fill, consume and define.
This room is punctuated by a sole circular “total” void, composed of full and half-tones of blackest ever black, looking to total spatial openness — beyond Concetti Spaziali. Like a star sitting in the flatness of darkened space, only to spiral, transform into a destructive void (a black hole), presenting a focus that nothing can escape, the moment of calm and pure emptiness before the storm. A tension so visceral. The total radial void — an open absence — offers speculative opportunity, while also talking to the very present and direct state of being (within this room, at this moment, within this space) and the particular possibilities present in this contemporaneity.
In this room, objects sit alongside and in context with examples of totality via spatial voids. They play in grey zones — literally and figuratively — exploring a space of hybrid spatial presences, but ever self-contained. These distinct objects draw you into an extension of themselves, perspectives reversed, and you find yourself within a new room. Lying down in the evening without the aid of artificial light, contemplating the endless architectural openings — homages to squares — which cast night tones of light across walls of pre-existing monochromatic gradients, punctuating their natural dimness — or inverted lightness. Light outlines new space confined within predefined space. Objects become rooms within rooms, entombing their viewers in new spatial parameters.
This is a room of radically definitive definitions with diversity.
~ Jack Willet