Anthony Miler: Tomorrow’s Not What It Used To Be

The Pit is pleased to present Tomorrow’s Not What It Used to Be, a solo exhibition by Anthony Miler, his second with the gallery. The exhibition includes paintings on canvas and a new series of unique aluminum sculptures. The exhibition will be on view from June 28 - August 9, 2025 with an opening reception on Saturday June 28 from 5-7 pm. 

Best known for his striking, abstracted paintings that challenge visual perception through a series of propositions and negations, Miler now introduces sculpture into his practice for the first time. These new aluminum sculptures, some paired with wood, stone, and painted elements, mimic the geological process of compression, the same natural force that formed our planet over millennia. Simultaneously dense and delicate, the sculptures straddle a tension between the industrial and the elemental, resembling forms extracted from the painting’s extraterrestrial terrains.  Anchoring the exhibition’s contemplative tone, the sculptures are paired with a series of paintings that vacillate between spatial illusion and graphic flatness, employing bold outlines, soft gradients, and archetypal motifs like the singular eye. Miler’s use of the eye—a signifier of a body behind the gaze—gives his images a strong sense of presence, inviting not ownership but relationship, turning them into mirrors that reflect something essential about what it means to be human in a temporal blip of geological time.

Miler approaches these paintings as an ethical and material inquiry. His practice resists narrative, instead building meaning through visual dialogue—space interrupted by line, volume challenged by silhouette. The paintings often appear simple, but they are built through layers of opposites: soft gradients juxtaposed with thick texture, then outlined to flatten them again. A horizon line appears and is interrupted by a bold shape, each object lit from a different source. In many cases, it’s hard to tell where the figure (if indeed it is a figure) ends and the background begins. Suns or moons appear in several paintings, but they often look more like cutouts than glowing objects in the sky. A reason for these methodical negations is to let the work become self-aware—where the visual elements define themselves by showing what they are not. Importantly, no single element depends on the disenfranchisement of another to establish its identity. Instead, they work together communally, each part contributing equally, which is essential to their existential condition. For Miler, this oscillation between negations is “a place to start from, an ethical model of building meaning, done so materially, reliant less upon what the painting depicts, and thinking more about its WAY of depicting.” In this interplay, painting becomes both subject and action: a body that constructs and deconstructs itself before the viewer exploring ideas of embodiment, perception, and relation. 

The exhibition’s title, Tomorrow’s Not What It Used To Be, plays on the instability of our collective imagination. Where we once projected infinite progress, we now navigate a fractured present shaped by ecological, historical, and social uncertainty. By placing the idea of “tomorrow” in the past, the title gestures toward the collapse of predictive clarity. Miler’s work doesn’t try to explain this complexity, but it gives space for us to feel it, to reflect on the elemental core of our being, and to meet the moment with a quiet clarity. It asks us not to escape the conditions of now, but to meet them through a practice of careful seeing.