DECADE

DECADE

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For the artist Nathan Miner, the spherical camera he built in 2006 is more than a tool and an object; it’s a story, a metaphor, and a landmark. The exhibition Decade at Rafius Fane Gallery in Boston during March and April 2016 takes as its conceptual premise the conflation of time and space, to consider ten years in the artist’s practice as a single event. Two objects linked in form and imagery, but separated by ten years in time, are shown side by side: C60, the spherical camera and its singular photographic product from a Brooklyn street corner in 2006 — and Jewel, a 60” diameter 32-sided geodesic sphere-painting completed in 2015, which utilizes the imagery from the spherical photograph. The use of the photograph in Jewel links the objects across time and space. In these works the world is inverted — translated from a world that would surround the viewer to a world that must be surrounded by the viewer. In a conceptual abstraction the artist posits the collection of paintings and objects in this exhibition as a single event and the space between them as a landmark drawn across time.

In the decade of artistic territory between the spherical camera and the spherical painting, Miner has looked to physics and psychology for the foundations of experience. At the limits of both fields, certainty about fundamentals evaporates: here time may be only an illusion, and dreams may

be real. In this body of work, Miner attempts to dismantle the known, to erode the concreteness of knowledge as a way to expose and cripple preconceived notions about reality. His large-scale paintings invigorate a primal, physical way of seeing. Patterns of reality cloaked in abstract imagery seductively lead the viewing mind away from the comfort of the known, where the rawness of phenomena and the optical experience can be examined and where vision itself can be witnessed.

The spherical camera is a metaphor for the desire to see and to completely understand the whole of reality. Its aesthetic of brass and mahogany harken to the early scientific instruments of the Renaissance and the age of enlightenment. The photograph is a scientific document, a record of all the light passing through a single point within the matrix of space/time. The photographic event is an inversion of space/time at the point of the photograph, an incision, collection, and reversal of the light in that place at that moment. By creating a conceptual bridge back through time this work also defies time and space; it widens to a comprehensive view of the world beyond immediate surroundings and specific moments of experience. Over the past decade Miner has repeatedly looked to this landmark to find his bearings in the creation of a body of work centered on the primacy of raw experience.

for the artist

C60 Camera, 2006 18” x 18” x 18” Mahogany 32-sided geodesic sphere with brass lenses

C60 PhotograPh, 2006 10”×10”×10” ink-jet print on 32-sided paper geodesic sphere

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Jewel, 2015 60”×60”×60” Mixed media and oil paint on paneled 32-sided geodesic sphere

STATEMENT

My paintings are about slowing down and looking closely. They are a form of creative resistance to the fast pace of our times. They investigate both the phenomenological experience of time and our optical relation with the world. They are about perception and invite contemplation. I meticulously craft the surfaces of my work to possess a visually seductive softness and yet a feel that is bold and dynamic at the same time. The works are invitations to visually journey — not simply to traverse across the surface of the work, but also to delve deep in illusory fields. In this way I extend the pictorial space of the painting beyond the confines of a “canvas,” beyond the gallery wall and out into the space of the viewer in an effort to evoke the feeling of being surrounded by nature and time at both a micro and macro level.

I combine drawing and painting with a simultaneous digital process that extends the limitations of traditional techniques and our understanding of them. I don’t design my paintings in the computer and then paint them from a digital original; rather, in a continuous feedback loop, the real informs the digital, and vice versa. I begin by bringing photographs and scanned images of traditionally drawn sketches into the computer; there I create dense Photoshop files. Then I print the new compositions onto paper,

work on them by hand with traditional drawing and painting techniques, and feed digital versions of these back into the computer, creating multiple generations of works and evolving compositions through an iterative process. The results materialize at a mural scale, with layers of drawing and water- and oil-based paints on top of prints mounted across aluminum panel surfaces.

My studio practice moves fluidly between architecture, installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting. In the call to create there is a challenge to the self, a call to presence, a focusing of attention and of being to a point of worldly coincidence. There is a fusing of the self and the world that paradoxically both erodes the illusion of separateness, and enhances recognition of the individual qualities of person and place. To see is to surrender preconceptions and to embrace the freedom of vision is a head-long leap into an abyss. In surrendering to the unknown — embracing it — one can alight in novel and creative territory. My works are environments as well as images and objects; they are constructed to be seen and lived. They reveal imagery extracted from unseen realms and are positioned as stages to challenge and to witness the drama-of-mind playing out across unfamiliar territories.

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on practice

Jewel, 2015 60” x 60” x 60” Mixed media and oil paint on paneled 32-sided geodesic sphere

eChoes embraCe, 2011 80” x 240” Mixed media and oil paint on 12 panels for an interior corner

ECHOES EMBRACENathan Miner’s colossal mixed-media painting, Echoes Embrace, 2011, is composed of twelve adjacent 40” x 40” panels, bisected at midpoint by the corner of the gallery walls. Stylistically akin to the mind-bending biomorphic “inscapes” made by Matta in the early 1940s, Miner’s evolving forms mutate and flow across the surface of the 80” x 240” work. Here, he creates a fluid realm of energized space where aberrations of organic forms — such as a partial upper profile and a giant Bird of Paradise flower — undergo metamorphosis in surfaces lit by an otherworldly palette dominated by smoky grays, silvers, blues, oranges, yellows, reds and blacks. These surreal images, camouflaged by dynamic abstract force fields of line and color, suggest that Echoes Embrace depicts the artist’s personal vision of genesis and/or disintegration of the universe.

Echoes Embrace represents an oddly familiar but distant universe created through contemporary techniques which weave photography, digital printmaking, airbrush and traditional drawing and painting. The initial source for Miner’s large installation was numerous photographs taken by the artist of airport runways looking down and out from the window of an aircraft. Complete with yellow and black straight and curved directional markings, these photographs — part of a series called “Threshold” — provided the basic geometric structures for subsequent digital prints scanned and manipulated in Photoshop, printed on a wide-format Epson printer, and then worked on by hand. Preliminary studies for Echoes Embrace are hallucinatory mixed-processed images filled with oranges and sky-blue accents where directional lines melt away and unearthly architecture and floral atoms begin to appear.

As the process of scanning, digital editing, drawing and painting on printed surfaces was repeated, the scale of the prints increased and the resultant images on thick grainy paper became increasingly loose and abstract. The base images for each of the dozen squares that comprise Echoes Embrace were printed faintly, to act as tonal architecture for the developing composition. Before painting, Miner attached each printed section to aluminum backing and then assembled these “tiles” to create a visually and thematically interconnected surface. The structure of the imagery develops from building up layers using pencil, watercolor, acrylic and gouache washes, and airbrush. At a certain point, the “tiles” were sealed with customized shellac so that the artist was able to finish the composition by blending in rich oil pigments, while leaving the layers of the creation process visible. Vectors, or rays of light, lead into the corner of the painting where the two sections of the panels meet. The left and right side echo one another — witness to the idea that beneath the illusion of separateness lays a field of interconnectivity where all things unite.

Miner’s attraction to the yellow and black broken and contiguous lines on pavement, which facilitate an aviator’s take-offs and landings, is grounded in the artist’s own experience as a “backpacking” world traveler. After graduating from art school at Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, he visited Kenya, Zanzibar, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Berlin and Paris. Subsequent trips were made to India, Japan, Mexico and Kona. During his frequent flights, Miner often found himself visually and mentally immersed in window views of changing skies, clouds, mountains, flatlands, oceans and active volcanoes. The transcendent and sublime experience of being high above a changing landscape also led to the

creation of Echoes Embrace. Besides the runways, the brilliant oranges and blues in Echoes Embrace were inspired by Miner’s “High Altitude Horizons” series of photographs, as well as spectacular images of clouds, sunrises and sunsets made while looking out from an airplane in full flight. Miner explains,

Sometimes during flight, gazing out upon a sea of clouds, the mind wanders freely amongst them in reflection and anticipation, visions are projected and received, dreams are born and remembered.1

Taken as a whole, Echoes Embrace is a sea of primordial energy that contains deep meditations on biological and cosmological nature; DNA chains and the complexity of neurons and dendrites commingle with immense areas of interstellar gases on the edge of space. The resultant multi-panel painting explodes in places with gravitational anarchy, and a variety of hot colors that evoke igneous gases emitted from the earth’s core.

In 1908, Hermann Minkowski, a German mathematician and teacher of Albert Einstein, gave the name “Space-Time Continuum” to a series of equations made by his student which expressed the interrelationship of space and time. In his 1905 Theory of Relativity, Einstein suggested that as time expands, space contracts, creating a fourth dimension. Tipping his hat to the mathematics of Einstein, Echoes Embrace invokes the fourth dimension where nature is looked at through the lens of time. For Miner, a moment in another universe might take 100 years and in his cosmic realms, the converse is also true; here a century could be accelerated to a single second. According to the artist,

Given shifting scales of time — a century seen in an hour — the seemingly solid forms in our world take on more fluid qualities; trees erupt from the ground like geysers, while concrete and steel flex and dissolve.2

Echoes Embrace, 2011, is the product of a fertile mind that not only embraces early 20th century physics, but also takes on 21st-century quantum mechanics. Miner is a champion of physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (Free Press, New York, 2012), who postulates that even space can arise from nothing. Krauss sees empty space as a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can’t even measure them. Krauss’s ideas that a universe can pop into existence at any time, that our universe is not unique, and that there may be many universes with different laws of physics seem to parallel and inform Miner’s own ideas about creation and its artistic expression. For Nathan Miner, ideas of a set reality are merely illusions of our limits of understanding. It is his artistic goal to push these boundaries by simulating the experience of a vernal pool of creativity, where our world shifts dimensions within a dynamic universe. In essence, Echoes Embrace exists at the intersection between science, nature and art, where the cosmic world is enigmatic and awesome.

Francine Koslow Miller, PhDJanuary 29, 2012

1 Artists Statement, January 14, 2012.2 Nathan Miner, interview with the author,January 23, 2012.

Essay by Francine Koslow Miller, PhD

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eChoes embraCe, 2011 Detail, Mixed media and oil paint on 12 panels for an interior corner eChoes embraCe, 2011 Detail, Mixed media and oil paint on 12 panels for an interior corner

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STATEMENT

In iteration there is generation. Through my work I aim to discover experiences, ideas, and feelings that are new to me. I want my work to take me to places I’ve never been before, where I will see and learn new things about the world and about myself. If I could fully conceive of a particular piece as I began work on it, making it would not interest me; it would merely be execution, and the work would be dead. I try to envision the work as channeling something vital into the world that comes through me rather than from me — as hosting something that seems to have a life of its own — and so I cultivate processes that allow the work to emerge through my interactions with it. Together, iteration, translation, and processes of feedback can generate new territory.

Since 2010 I have been more deliberate about staging the relationships and interactions between myself, the mediums, and my tools. The first major work I created in this way was Echoes Embrace (2011), which illustrates both my practice and my process. (It is not included in the Rafius Fane Gallery show.) I started small — 11” x 16” — with the series Emergence Sketches, pencil, watercolor, and gouache layered

on top of photographs of airport runways. This first generation spawned 22” x 30” works on paper, the Emergence Series, Many images from both generations were compiled to create the composition for the much larger Echoes Embrace. In the essay on the previous page, Francine Koslow Miller writes of this.

The initial source for Miner’s large installation was numerous photographs taken by the artist of airport runways looking down and out from the window of an aircraft. Complete with yellow and black straight and curved directional markings, these photographs — part of a series called “Threshold” — provided the basic geometric structures for subsequent digital prints scanned and manipulated in Photoshop, printed on a wide-format Epson printer, and then worked on by hand. Preliminary studies for Echoes Embrace are hallucinatory mixed-processed images filled with oranges and sky-blue accents where directional lines melt away and unearthly architecture and floral atoms begin to appear.

on process

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emergenCe sketCh #3, 2011 16” x 11” Mixed media on paper

emergenCe #1, 2011 30” x 22” Mixed media on paper emergenCe #3, 2011 30” x 22” Mixed media on paper

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Field reFleCtions Field #1, 2012 18”x18” Mixed media on paper

FIELD REFLECTIONS

Echoes Embrace led to an interesting and unexpected discovery. Being “inside” the painting — standing in the corner of the gallery with the imagery flowing around — arouses an unusual sensation. The viewing is highly physical; following the sweeping arcs of paint requires turning one’s whole head and body, and moving around creates shifting illusions of lines bending or transcending the adjacent planes of the painting. Subtle shifts of light reflecting from the polished paper surface interact with these factors of scale and form to provoke an eerie sensation that the work is alive and moving before you. Coupled with the highly abstracted patterns gleaned from real world environments, this creates the desire to mentally wrestle the suggestive patterns into known categories of experience, to blend an understanding of the visual field into a personal matrix of associative coherence. At the same time, other-worldly colors and hard-to-classify qualities of shape and illusory motion seem to resist resolution, as if the painting is wrestling to retain its autonomy.

I came to think about this as “the physicality of seeing” and began to contemplate how such large-scale paintings could bridge a gap between ordinary “looking” and deeper “vision,” by reaching deeper into the psyche to a more primal state of “seeing.”

I set out to test this hypothesis with the Field Reflections paintings. I designed a loose strategy for interactions between myself, my computer and printer,

and my materials. The recipe goes like this:

Stepping into a Field 1. Find a Field2. Look for what might emerge3. Find an emergence4. Explore it as an object5. Use it to determine a new Field for its own context

The field I found, which began as a photograph of a tile floor, was created by importing the photograph into various computer programs and building a crude perspectival gridded world. I began to look for what might emerge by working directly on top of two different prints of the field. To find an emergence I layered vellum over these two works and extracted lines, shapes, and colors from the emergent qualities of the drawings below; these became objects on the vellum. I scanned them into the computer and began manipulating them into combinations with each other, and with digital versions of their source fields. A series of these recombinant images were then printed out and reworked by hand with pencil, gouache, watercolor, and acrylic paint. The final compositions for the 10-foot-square Field Reflections diptych were then derived from these preliminary studies. The two large works face one another, constraining the viewing experience within a pressurized space and insinuating the viewer into the pictorial framework.

stepping into a field

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Field reFleCtions event #1, 2012 18”x18” Mixed media on vellum Field reFleCtions event #2, 2012 18”x18” Mixed media on vellum

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study For Field reFleCtions #1, 2012 18”x18” Mixed media on paper Field reFleCtions #1, 2012 120”x120” Mixed media and oil paint on 9 panels

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Field reFleCtions #2, 2013 120”x120” Mixed media and oil paint on 9 panels study For Field reFleCtions #2, 2012 18”x18” Mixed media on paper

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INDRA’S NET

“Indra’s net” is the net of the Vedic god Indra. It hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the axis mundi of Hindu cosmology. The net is imagined to have a multifaceted jewel at each vertex. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, the image of “Indra’s net” is used to describe the interconnectedness of the universe:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

The source images of the tile floor and the sketches I made for the Field Reflections paintings reminded me of this cosmic imagery, and also of images from a contemporary source: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Hawking also uses the net-like pattern of a grid to illustrate how massive objects in

the universe warp space/time. In the sketches that became the painting series Indra’s Net #1 and #2, I wanted to explore how my own energy could warp the pictorial field. I considered myself the emergent object within the paintings; they were containers for manifesting myself through the focusing of my energy and attention. I like the idea from artist Francis Bacon that the visual field of a painting can connect directly to the nervous system. The opposite is true, too: the art one makes also makes the artist.

With the Indra’s Net paintings I extend this idea to the viewer. I believe that the “Art” resides not in the art object, but in the experience of it, and therefore the qualities that can be derived from a work of art depend in part upon the energy and attention of the viewer. While the metaphor of Indra’s net has been used to convey in a general sense the complete and mutual interpenetration of everything within the cosmos, for me these paintings came to represent the specific interpenetration of the seer and the seen. In them, currents of energy warp and scale into the distance around focal points of turbulent disruption. As the moments of disruption arose during the creative process, my increased attention to them added energy to the turbulence. Viewing the twists and snarls of colors and shapes entangles seeing and tears at the probing mind. In this way the paintings offer the viewer a field upon which to witness the emergence and dissolution of their own thoughts on being and becoming. The act of viewing the work creates the art.

and the jewels

studies For indra’s net #1 & #2, 2013 22” x 30” Mixed media on paper

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indra’s net #1, 2014 58” x 114” Mixed media and oil paint on 3 panels

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indra’s net #2, 2014 58” x 114” Mixed media and oil paint on 3 panels

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study For Chimera, 2009 30” x 40” Mixed media on paper

CHIMERA

The mythological chimera of the Greeks was a three-bodied beast, a fire-breathing lion with the head of a goat emerging from its back and a serpent for a tail. It symbolized the harshness, ferocity and volatility of nature. Postclassical treatments of the myth have come to incorporate the modern meaning of the word: a fleeting illusion, particularly dangerous because it cannot be dismissed. In the realm of ideas it has the figurative meaning of “wild fantasy.” Philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) wrote about God as a chimerical idea, composed from concepts of omniscience, omnipotence, and love, and Hume regarded the self as a psychological chimera. As myth, symbol, and idea, the word is self-reflexive; its definition is a chimerical amalgamation of fantastic principles.

Chimera, the painting, is about the wild fantasy of presumption, and the dangerous glimpse of a reckless idea that knowing is an impossibility. The composition was constructed from multiple photographs of text and images of an earlier work on paper, Study for Chimera. The format of the curved wall that physically recedes in the space, and the shape of the panels

decreasing in height from the center outwards, creates an illusionistic phenomenon wherein two brain processes become at odds with one another. The “where-center” of the brain analyzes the physical placement of the painting’s structure in space, while the “what-center” contrives contrary determinations regarding the shape and nature of the content within the painting. This cognitive dissonance agitates the viewing, helping to keep it fresh and imbuing the paintings with a perceived vitality that animates the phenomenological experience.

I like considering the idea of self as chimerical — unruly and hard to classify. In conscious experience there is nothing that is not sensation of world or body. As an individual one is not a discrete being, but a complex amalgamation of biological materials and processes in a collaborative dance with the universe. We have ideas about our identity, but without a complete understanding of our environment — or the universe — the terms that bind these ideas are necessarily fractional and incomplete, rendering knowledge of the self the ultimate timeless dream.

wild fantasy

Chimera, 2014 120” x 216” Mixed media and oil paint on 11 panels for a curved wall

Rafius fane GalleRy — © nathan MineR — RafiusfaneGalleRy.coM