VOID/GRAVITY: Dominic Paul Miller, Works On Paper

You may feel like you’re missing something. Or perhaps you’re trying to imagine yourself in the Salton Sea. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at quite yet.

Cognitive dissonance is precisely what the three works by Dominic Paul Miller deliver. The photographs and sculpture (each existing as a form of material fragmentation—not unlike the geographical location of the Salton Sea itself) are all sites of the work. Miller is aware that places are imagined and created by uncontrollable forces, rendering them nearly impossible to grasp in their totality. The photographs, Salt Exclosure (day 2, noon sun) and Salt Exclosure (day 68, plant light) highlight the fact that we are only mere dots in motion on the topography of any site, present only in a fleeting, temporal moment. Salt Sculpture, Imperial Valley (cropped and tiled) is an ephemeral sculptural map made of salt from the site of inquiry, time- and site-specific in its material composition inside the gallery, susceptible to change by even a slight gust of air.

It is important to note that Miller’s investigation into the Salton Sea is not a lone endeavor. Initially, the artist worked with a team of student engineers to produce the galvanized steel and electrical pump assembly structure seen in the photographs in order to address the increased levels of salinity that threaten the Salton Sea environs. By working collaboratively and across fields, Miller explains that “the margin between social and ecological domains really became the focus; meanwhile, what is perceived as artificial or natural remains extremely ambiguous, even as we become increasingly aware of the complex systems within nature.”

The grouping of the photographs and salt map in SUBTERRANEA and a selection of Miller’s studies, sketches, journals and other works on paper (exhibited concurrently in the Discursive and Curatorial Productions Initiative space) underscore the displacement of his interrogation into the Salton Sea. Each piece, organic or manipulated, down to the finest grain of salt, is an autonomous object of its own. As viewers, we are granted access to this particular geographic landmark through the poetic subjectivity of the artist, documentation of his collaborative efforts and material manifestations of a visually complex, multivalent narrative. In this sense, we start to know more about the artist than we do of the site itself.