Innies, Outies, and Inbetweenies

Miller Robinson dives into the messy entanglements and minutia of the unfathomably dense layers of relationships in the world. Everything is connected, the land is parallel with human and more-than-human, but instability is endemic, friction a constant. Robinson assembles constellations of sculpted objects, found materials, pills, chemicals, paintings, drawings, medicine, plants, handcrafted and industrially produced. They are metaphors for engaging with one’s senses and the wider world. The materials are essential agents in sharing their own stories— through movement, sounds, texture—through their inherent specificity and through the sensuality of mimicking the land and the corresponding eco-erotics. Always centered back as points of self-reflection. The intersecting issues the works raise articulate stories of disembodiment and precarity. They name the anxiety of the objects—their staring eyes, the discordant strengths of all the diverse materials and subjects.

Miller’s material transformations assert sharp impressions of disparity, hope, harm, power, safety and most urgently survival. With grace, admiration of grief processing, and the immense disconnect and cataclysmic shift that colonialism caused. Through systems of care, the work serves to usher individual and collective perspective toward a deep needed rewiring of our senses and systems of thought; inside, outside, and in-between. Memories, moments and dreams toward liberation and sanity are offered up as salves to dress harms both received and inflicted, interrupted. An undoing of assimilated values. An attempted healing of the planet under the weights and horrors of climate catastrophe. Materials, objects, and self influence the arrangements, they shape and reshape each other in a perpetual rebalancing. There are not always clear or resolved answers, but the questions asked are essential to trying to understand deeply. Joys and frustrations, the slow churn of larger machinations. Robinson’s intimate work blurs the boundaries between the personal and the world around us. Acknowledging that self and identity are unfixed. Miller draws inspiration from subtleties of everyday life: land, language, passing conversations, chores, “trash” found on the ground, passing light and shimmering reflections. The commonplace become containers to spur deeper investigations into understandings of relationality. These small elements of daily lives reflect and mold the larger ways we connect to communities, and how those communities in turn impact others. This multitude of rippling creates a woven fabric of life. Images and allusions to fish, birds, and moths consistently align focus back to bodies of water and sky. Layers of atmosphere are reflected in Miller’s assemblages of components.

“As an artist and healer, my work drives me toward the wounds and wounded, with the imperative that even the most vulnerable can survive in finding beauty. The pain of not belonging leading to an assertion of my two-spiritedness in everything I do. The making of the work is an act of caring, an act of refusal. The objects becoming active participants in the lives around them.” Miller’s sentiments about the lives of objects and materials comes from a rich history of culture from the Klamath River basin. Scholars like Melissa Nelson and other indigenous feminist thinkers have become important influences too. Using trickster oral literature, this installation is coded with illusive materials and images, investigating areas of uncertainty or spaces usually hidden. Several works are portals and shrines, spurring change or creating spaces where reverence and remembrance can occur. It thinks about the scope of the work as as telescoping, layering and expanding simultaneously, scaling up and down, to both the infinite and infinitesimal — reminding of the vast intersections of cultural positionality.

The collective works here, including personal elements like pillows and jackets, breakdown a strict division of interior and exterior. They insist upon the case that greater care and consideration, often thought of as private and personal, are imminently possible, and essential, on a larger scale.