The Skinny Showcase: Dan Miller

Dan Miller’s works meticulously pursue duplicities, mapping their inherent mutations. Through a variety of forms and materials including painting, collage and sculptural installation, Dan produces and re-produces facsimiles of his own and appropriated works. In Still Life 2008 (above) he takes two ‘paint-your-own’ canvases, working simultaneously on both, mark for mark, carrying out a chain of futile exercises to create ‘twinned’ paintings rather than a traditional diptych.  
Often using found or appropriated imagery Dan’s collages plunder meanings from historical motifs and architectural designs to form compositions that hover uneasily within space, avoiding the taming influence of narratives or context. Assemblage 2007 (right) like many of Dan’s sculptural works takes its conception from a previous work, the rubbing being the residue of another collage. Recent works have been inspired by the exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler, an architect and theatre designer who pioneered exhibition displays for Peggy Guggenhiem in the 1940s. Although spanning a range of materials the works demonstrate a practice moving in multiple directions. Inevitably they conjoin into a rigorous and calculated exploration of production and failure.
Dan is currently exhibiting in Leger Trager with Kevin Pollock at the Grace & Clark Fyfe Gallery at Glasgow School of Art until 2 May and is scheduled to show at the Southside Studios, Glasgow this autumn. [Jamie Kenyon]
<a href="http://www.danlmiller.co.uk" target="_blank">www.danlmiller.co.uk</a>