The Justice

I swung open the glass double-doors of the Rose Art Museum this past Friday and was struck by the originality of the cacophonous art before me. Black lines, cast across the front of white canvas; numbers and gibberish penetrating bold boundaries. Splashes of color existed where one wouldn't assume they should. I was unsettled, confused and awed. I was looking at the paintings of Steve Miller.

Miller's work encompasses the entire entrance floor of the Rose and, in doing so, makes a bold statement about this season's exhibition. What is laid out in front of the viewer is an active juxtaposition between what one assumes to be two fundamentally unrelated fields-science and art. However, Miller combines both of these to create paintings that captivate and intrigue the viewer and leave him wanting more.

In the exhibition catalogue for "Spiraling Inward," the 57-year-old New York artist's first solo museum show in the United States, Rose Director Michael Rush writes, "An inevitable, if uneasy, alliance between art and science has existed for centuries. When confronted with an empty canvas or a blank blackboard, the artist and scientists are one: Both are poised to solve a problem that they have set for themselves." Miller's challenge, it seems, is to explore the unknown-a prospect that confounds us, makes us squirm and only leads to more questions.

The human body is complex and vast. We know more about the world around us than we do about the microorganisms, bacteria and viruses that inhabit our bodies. By the early 1980s, scientific elements such as viruses and cancer cells began appearing in Miller's work. While this theme has been explored since the advent of photo microscopy at the end of the 19th century, Miller takes this subject, which has traditionally been grounded in the field of photography, and reconciles it with his own interest in painting.

The result is nothing short of spectacular. Large canvases reach around the room, encompassing the viewer in an uneasy world. In "Illuminated Serum" (2007), an 81-by-50.5 inch canvas, indiscernible writings stream across a white canvas. Dominating the work is a black, amorphous blob stretching from top to bottom, whose monumentality of this element however, is tempered by soft black lines, adding an element of horizontality. As if he has not given us enough to keep our eyes occupied, a third structure, a protein molecule, penetrates the black blob. While these three separate elements-a molecule, black paint and handwriting-seem fundamentally discordant,the juxtaposition creates an inclusive work, sound and confident in its appearance. The layering effect of blacks and whites is correlative to the voids and solids present in neoclassical architecture. The positioning allows the eye to drift in and out among the abundance of planes on the two-dimensional canvas. Science and art are literally interwoven and inseparable, as they are in Miller's mind.

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