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28/5/2010

Jeremy Millar

Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth

Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre

Amongst Others presents a collection of works by the British artist Jeremy Millar. The exhibition draws together new pieces by the artist with earlier series to explore intersecting narratives of art and belief. Working in a broad range of media — that includes photography, text, video and sculpture — Millar’s practice excavates the history of cultural production and marks breaks with consensual thinking through processes of speculation. Art making is an activity that constantly tests what is thought to be known, seeking out alternative forms of communication as familiar tools become inadequate for the task. Identifying fissures across time and space, Millar ruminates on how possibilities from one place or time can be reconfigured in the present.

Amongst Others considers how culture and history develop from a network of exchanges that formulate understanding, claiming an impossible space between systems of received knowledge. Often built on miscommunication and missed possibilities, the proliferation, and obstruction, of history is predicated on assumptions created from unreliable truths. It is these slippages that Millar takes possession of in his artistic practice.

At the centre of this exhibition are two commissioned works by Plymouth Arts Centre: Untitled (Mirror Cubes) and Incomplete Open Cubes (Burnt).The sculptures explore the relationship between ritual systems and the recent history of American conceptual and minimal art practices that established contemporary understandings of art as a negotiation between idea and object. These ‘cube’ works are based on Robert Morris’ Mirror Cubes (1965) and Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (a serial project, begun in 1974).

The third new work is Tokinana sola Bosubasoba and Tristan und Iseult, a film recounting the oft-reworked medieval love-romance, based on a Celtic legend, Tristan and Isolde . In Millar’s version, the poet and playwright Chief John Kasaipwalova re-tells the story, speaking the language of his native Kiriwina, a small island off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. As the narrative unfolds, it is woven into the creation myths of the region. Developed in Papua New Guinea during Millar’s 2009 research into the forms of magic studied by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, the film was shot in a sacred cave, a place that echoes the site in which Tristan and Isolde themselves are said to have sought refuge.

Throughout his artistic practice, Millar collides the belief-led systems of magic and art, drawing these two irrational structures of understanding together to underline their power to interpret and engage with the world that surrounds us. Millar places his work amongst the cultural production of others — from channelling the avant-garde writer and photographer Stanislaw Witkiewicz in a series of portraits (As Witkiewicz, 2009); to invoking a ritual used the Kongo people on to a minimal ‘primary form’ (Object to be awakened, 2009); through to a series of photographs taking inspiration from a short story of a captured sorcerer by Jorge Luis Borges (The Mirror of Ink (sinister), 2007); and a destroyed recording of a conversation with the British novelist JG Ballard (Erased Ballard Interview, 1996). In the midst of this network of connections, Millar releases singular artworks that mobilise histories to illuminate the present.

Biographies

Jeremy Millar
Jeremy Millar is an artist living in Whitstable, Kent. His work has recently been seen in solo exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum, London, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and HICA, near Inverness, and in group exhibitions such as 'Sculpture of the Space Age' at David Roberts Art Foundation, London, and 'The Dark Monarch' at Tate St. Ives. He is currently working towards solo exhibitions at CCA, Glasgow, and Focal Point Gallery, Southend, as well as new commissions for Camden Art Centre, and for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is also developing a new Topeng, or work of Balinese masked-theatre, in collaboration with Forma.

Lisa Le Feuvre
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer based in London. She is senior lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, commissioning work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renée Green and Jeremy Millar. In 2009 she curated the exhibitions ‘Joachim Koester: Poison Protocols and Other Histories’ at Stills, Edinburgh and ‘Economies of Attention’ from the Arts Council of England Collection. In 2010-11 she will co-curate ‘British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet’ (with Tom Morton) and ‘Alexander and Susan Maris: The Pursuit of Fidelity (A Retrospective)’ at Stills. Her edited book ‘Failure’, published by MIT Press/Whitechapel Art Gallery, is published in May.

For more information contact: Hannah Prothero, Marketing & Communications Manager, Plymouth Arts Centre, phone: 01752 276990, email: hannah@plymouthartscentre.org

Image: Jeremy Millar, Mirror of Ink
The Mirror of Ink (sinister) (2007)

Opening 29 May, 2010

Plymouth Arts Centre
38 Looe Street, Plymouth PL4 0EB
Gallery opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 8.30pm
Sunday 4pm - 8.30pm

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