Mendacious Veracity

SPACE is proud to present Mendacious Veracity, a colorful installation by Liz Miller who currently resides in Good Thunder, MN. 

Through mixed media installations and works on paper, Liz Miller creates elaborate, abstract fictions that incorporate fragments of reality. The elegant, lacy silhouettes of imagery from sources such as firearms, killer bees, and deadly plants are spliced with imagined forms to create sculptural interludes that are absurd, menacing, and poetic. Pattern and tactility confuse and complicate identification, camouflaging recognizable forms and evoking recognition when applied to non-objective forms. The tensions between fact/fiction and dimensionality/flatness are endlessly fascinating to her, playing out in her work as a dialogue between reality and illusion, while conflating fantasy and fiction.

For SPACE, Miller creates a landscape of non-objective, draping textile forms interspersed with and responding to rigid, rectilinear platforms anchored at various levels throughout the space. The play between hard and soft materials combined with the materials’ various surface qualities and relatively low-tech construction methods reinforces the artifice of the sculptural environment, reminding viewers that any illusion is fleeting. While the forms in the installation are not instantly recognizable and do not bear reference to one specific set of imagery, they can certainly be read as beautiful, absurd, poetic, and even menacing at times. The alternate interpretations and possibilities in these seemingly simple shapes is a continual source of inspiration. The viewer completes the experience, becoming a participant in a large-scale fiction, moving through the work’s various facets as an actor on a stage set, each audience member a character in a beautiful impossibility. 

Liz Miller received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Minnesota. Miller’s large-scale, mixed-media installations and works on paper have been featured in solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally and internationally. Miller’s awards include a 2013 McKnight Professional Development Grant from Forecast Public Art; a 2011-12 McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists; a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; a 2007-08 MCAD/Jerome Foundation Fellowship; and Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board in 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Miller lives and works in Good Thunder, MN. She is Professor of Installation and Drawing at Minnesota State University-Mankato.

Instagram: @lizlenoremiller