Suspicion: Recent Work by Shayna Miller C’19 is on display through early October
August 2024 – Drew University has announced an exhibition in the Korn Gallery on campus, Suspicion: Recent Work by Shayna Miller C’19, curated by Kimberly Rhodes, professor of art history. The exhibit will be on view August 27 through October 4.
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An opening reception for Miller will be held on September 6 from 5-7 p.m. in the Korn Gallery. The Korn Gallery is open for viewing Tuesday through Friday 12-4 pm and by appointment.
Miller seeks to make embodied paintings that must exist on the surface in a particular way, whereby the oil paint coalesces, embedded, with the ground. She builds up panels with protruding points, as if a mass is pushing up from behind the burlap-stretched painting surface, poking, piercing out. Paint camouflages the protuberance but also reveals it. These protrusions or pressure points in her work may be understood in a number of ways: as a mass coming through the painting, like a foot gently poking through stockings; as a muscle, a limb, pushing out and then retracting; as the “stuff” that forms a body; as a naive (but trustworthy) defense mechanism established as a protection; ultimately, as a painting bursting out, being pulled apart. While Miller has become suspicious of flatness, she also wonders whether the painting can be suspicious of its own self, of its own body and muscle. Its eye extends outward, watching us.
Miller graduated from Drew as an art and art history double major and double minor in comparative religion and medieval studies. She was awarded the Stanley Prescott Hooper Memorial Prize in 2019 for promise and integrity in studio art. After Drew, Miller received her MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York, in 2024.
Miller’s work has recently been featured at My Pet Ram in New York, NY, and included in the group exhibitions It’s Getting to a Point at Thomas Van Dyke Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (curated by Alex Feim and Jack Arthur Wood), Facture Fracture at CHART in New York, NY, Modern Muses at the Park Hyatt in New York, NY (curated by Rachel Cole), and UNEXPECT at 205 Hudson St. in New York, NY. More information about her work can be found on her website shaynamiller.com.