DAVID M. C. MILLER

BIO

David M. C. Miller’s works have been presented across Canada and internationally since 1984. Working alone and collaboratively, he produces photographs, drawings, projections and installations, site-works, sculpture and performance. His photographic work explores the relationship that the technical image establishes between what is evident (appearance) and with the unrecoverable (disappearance). Miller studied Media Arts at Sheridan College, Oakville; Interdisciplinary Studio and Art History at NSCAD University, Halifax. He taught photography, drawing, open and extended media and the history of photography for institutions in Canada and abroad: The Academy of Cinema, Media and Performing Arts, Prague; Technical University, Brno; The Academy of Art, Architecture and Design, Prague; Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary; The Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; University of Guelph, Guelph; The Centrum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam; NSCAD University, Halifax. Born in Montréal, Miller currently teaches art at the University of Lethbridge.

STATEMENT

“Stark and stalwart, white fences erected throughout Lethbridge’s residential neighborhoods are photographed at night using a small digital camera equipped with a flash. These beacons of moral well-being are illuminated in the darkness and caught in the act of becoming visible, marking private and public space. Approaching pure white and absolute stillness, these social and symbolic thresholds announce a persistent ideal that White Fence at Night confronts and situates within a frame. American photographer Alfred Stieglitz once characterized Paul Strand’s iconic photograph, White Fence of 1916, as “Brutally direct, pure, and devoid of trickery.” Strand declared his image an abstraction, a radical departure from convention. In other words, White Fence was more than a white fence. The image became a conduit to move beyond the grinding inadequacies of dogma and wage labour to a realm of political and spiritual emancipation. White Fence at Night asserts itself as a work grounded in the material conditions and experiences of commonplace forms. It draws its outlines upon fallacy and failure: modernism’s idealism; Weegee’s spectacle of the everyday; abstract art; beyond practices ushered in by the likes of artists Edward Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher.”