Nicole Miller

Carlier Gebauer is pleased to present St. Martin & the Echo, Nicole Miller's third solo exhibition at the gallery in Berlin.

For this exhibition, Miller presents an archival work alongside new pieces. In her words, "This show is part eulogy, ecstatic grief, fecund longing, the palimpsest of family legacy, a meditation as inheritance, the reoccurrence of a theme, chiral, the mirror image of a twin, the transmutation of death into signification, and a belief in magic".

Miller draws on deeply personal and intimate moments to approach a fundamentally human experience: the destabilising event of the loss of kinfolk. The notion of transmutation is central to Miller's work, as a concept but also a physical condition. This is especially reflected in her choice of medium, the laser light installation. The laser beam itself is constituted by a transformation of audio waves into light waves, endlessly ceasing to be one thing and becoming another, as the viewer watches the light appear and vanish. Light itself is often connotated with transcendence, in Christian art saints or a holy person are depicted through the symbolism of light, the most common representation of a spiritual character appearing as a radiant circle or disk surrounding the head. Miller titled her exhibition after the saint Martín de Porres, who is known for his kindness and as the patron of social justice and animals. Born in the 16th century in Lima, he is noted to be the first Black Christian saint. Among the miracles attributed to him are his abilities to communicate with animals and levitation. He was a man who could fly.

In a video from 2008 Miller filmed her mother's twin brother practicing transcendental meditation in his bedroom. She captures him close up, with his eyes closed he seems deeply focused inwards, and almost oblivious to his surroundings. He sits crossed legged on the ground and applies the technique of yogic flying. A document of this practice and her uncle engaging with it, almost two decades later the mediation itself becomes a form of inheritance. An immaterial heirloom, it adds and makes up the story of this particular family. Following the theme of twinhood, the artist introduces a mirror image of dealing with her uncle's physical decline due to a struggle with Parkinson's disease, precedented in another moment of rupture, in what makes up the fabric of this family. Miller creates a new laser work, in which she recalls the story of her family's tree, that stood in their garden and fell recently. This fall echoes the grief of the loss of two other uncles in the same year. The handwritten words inscribe themselves on the wall, almost as if by magic, only to fade away. In another laser light projection, the tree appears as a ghost, an echo of it in its full bloom, and just like the writing, its outlines vanish into darkness.

Likewise, an echo conjures a doubling: A single utterance of speech becomes twofold, its fragments haunting the speaker. In Miller's latest video piece, we follow two unnamed characters, casually conversing, performing, blurring the line between enacting and documentation. The film is set among the art community of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, also tentatively portraying it. The themes of family and chosen family, of grief and longing reoccur in "Echo", hidden in subtle references and allusions, they appear in the conversations, the camera angles, the small gestures, in the laughter and the music. This exhibition is a eulogy, but one that finally testifies to a belief in magic.