Mark Takamichi Miller found a roll of film in Utah’s Zion National Park. He developed the film and painted the hikers who were in the photographs. Miller chose, however, to omit the backgrounds from the photos, leaving his subjects to stand out starkly as thick globs of oil paint against the white backdrops of his canvasses. Miller employs swirling colors and brushstrokes that render his subjects somewhat out of focus. He uses gray tones to create shadows that fall on their faces in the same fashion that often accompanies amateur photography. It also appears that he has retained both the scale and the position of his subjects from the original photographs, only now they are standing in space.
Miller’s paintings examine the impact of photography on portraiture. The original photographs were clearly taken to show the subjects against spectacular backdrops (the one possible exception being the painting of the man urinating, but who knows?). Miller strips away the backdrops and asks what the photos are really about: the people or the setting? At the same time, isolating the figures in the photos reveals characteristics about them that would have been lost against Zion’s sandstone cliffs. A figure with her hand on her hip striking a pose of accomplishment from the top of a rock is now simply striking a pose. The statement of the photograph: “I’ve climbed this rock” becomes simply “I climbed” in the painting. Miller’s paintings adopt the same strategy of pulling images apart as Alex Morrison’s drawings of empty houses [Every House I’ve Ever Lived In Drawn From Memory (2000)] currently at the Henry Art Gallery. Morrison draws attention to space in the absence of everything else. Miller turns the problem on its head and asks what an image can tell us if only the figure remains.
