Negative Landscape by John Miller
Produced and distributed by F
Release Date: July 2022
4.5 x 3.75 x 3.75 inches (11.43 x 9.53 x 9.53 cm)
Glass, water, 3D printed resin, flitter, painted pine, felt
Edition: 25 (numbered)
$1000 + shipping

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ADAM MARNIE Where does NO come from?

JOHN MILLER The NO and the other brown letters come from a 1987 series that correlates words and letters with body parts. In these works, I used a brown impasto to suggest excrement. The first NO was a two-part painting (one for each letter) titled The Horrible Negation. One impetus to make this work is Sigmund Freud’s postulation that infants assert autonomy by refusing toilet training. I like the idea that identity formation derives from refusal.

AM In your recent exhibition, Civic Center (Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, April 1 – May 21, 2022; all works 2022), NO appeared in State of Exception, a painting hung alone on the back wall, at the apex of the view of the entire show one had upon entering. Elsewhere in the show, there were other letter motifs: the letter I was repeated twice, once in the painting Autonomous Entry into Public Space and again as a large brown form, produced as a hemmed short nap carpet, directly in the entryway of the gallery. Another large brown carpet piece, O, in the same make as I, was centrally located in the main gallery space. I would say that O framed the exhibition except that by being so flat it easily got out of the visual field of the other work, even though in any wide view it’s quite prominent. Plus, one is allowed to walk directly over the carpet work. These carpet works are confrontational, or inviting, take your pick, but in Civic Center, if you didn’t want to walk on them you really had to choose not to, especially I which was placed diagonally across the entryway.

JM That’s right. You enter the gallery’s basement space from the ground floor. Before the stairway down, you go through a vestibule that is also a balcony. From there, you can see the main exhibition space from above. From this vantage point, the O was dominant, but once you went downstairs, the wall works took over.

AM What’s up with I and O?

Full interview: F PDF 018