Artist takes on surfaces in new installation exhibit
If you took the idea of “home” stripped its surface and installed it in a gallery what would it look like?
Well there are probably as many answers to that question as there are artists but Rebekah Miller offers her perspective in the latest exhibition at The New Gallery. Titled Skins the show is actually two distinct installation pieces: a diaphanous tent-like cabin that hangs from the ceiling and 10 birch trees suspended in a circle around a central anchor.
“While they are related and they are contingent on one another they’re separate from one another and they’re both extracted from that environment that I was pulling from which was my hometown Buck Lake [Alberta]” explains Miller.
The house is compact and archetypical complete with windows and doors designed into the surface. The wood-slat print for the art was taken from the remnants of a real structure from Miller’s hometown. While viewers can’t enter the house Miller’s left an opening so that people can peer inside the translucent building.
“It’s meant to be a ghosting and it’s meant to be a hollow structure” she explains. “I wanted the viewer to be able to project themselves or their experiences into the house itself through the transparency and at the same time it is meant to be a dream house a childhood home a naive conception of what a home might be.”
A few steps away are the long slender birch trees which at first seem much more solid than the house. Upon closer inspection though one realizes that they are only the outer bark of the trees stitched back together with a variety of contraptions — zippers and pins and bits of lace embedded in the tree’s skin holding the structure together.
Miller says that at first she included the fasteners as a logistical means of installing the trees and taking them apart. “But then I realized there’s something really interesting about the idea of using human fastening techniques” she says. “I very much relate the trees to the body and to clothing and in that way it relates to the idea of the façade and skin and what we perceive and what is beneath the structure or the body.”
The circular setup of the trees is evocative almost resembling a shrine. Miller comments that the circle is “a perfect balance — it’s a shape that is almost impossible to duplicate by a human hand but it’s found in nature all the time.”
When you get up close it’s hard to resist touching the artwork whether it’s the light shell of the house or the dense hybridized birch trees. Consider your permission granted: “Of course you don’t want people to manhandle the work [but] I really enjoy when people interact” says Miller. “I’m so interested in the materials and where they come from I would hope that people become interested as well and examine what is here. I put a lot of work in the small details so I want people to engage with those details.”
