MARK TAKAMICHI MILLER Cont'd
One Hour Photo Paintings
January, 2005

Miller’s painting technique and his painting Stutter (1999) are described by Matthew Kangas in Art In America (March 1999). Kangas states, “…black shapes…intrude upon the chromatic festivities like oil spills. In works such as this one, Miller is complicating rather than simplifying the underpainting and overlaid forms. Infused with a heavy materiality, his color insists on its own logic of subjective vision, risk and process.”

Curator Chris Bruce writes, “Why go to such great lengths to access anonymous imagery? Why not take his own photos, or invent his own images? The answer has to do with a desire to distance the artist’s relationship to subject in favor of a broader conceptual purpose - in this case, to depict photographic space by using extreme properties of paint.”

Mark Takamichi Miller is represented by Howard House gallery in Seattle, Washington and Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

Selected Exhibitions include:
Zion, Howard House, Solo exhibition, 2004, Seattle, WA
Second Set Free, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Solo exhibition, 2003,
Portland, OR
24 Exp, Howard House, Solo exhibition, 2003, Seattle, WA
The Sentimental Favorite: Abstract Painting, Group exhibition, Triple Candie, New York, NY

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

For the last several years I have been stealing anonymous people's snapshots from Costco. You can go up and buy anyone's photos you like.
I look for ones that have been there a long time and that have a double set of prints. I go to my car and take the second set of prints out, which I keep. I take the envelope with their negatives and first set of prints back to the racks so they can buy them. I use the snapshots as a source for my paintings. At first I had the intention of doing the paintings really quickly, taking snapshots of the paintings, and putting them back in the original photo
envelope at Costco so the customer could have the photos of the paintings as their second set. I started to do this, but the CEO of Costco happened to see my paintings in a show and changed the procedure of submitting film for processing, so I was never able to get the snapshots of the paintings back to the customer. I can still do my project when I visit a Costco far from
the ones in the Seattle area. Around here they have pretty much made it impossible to get the pictures or put them back in someone else‘s name.

—Mark Takamichi Miller

> View Miller Exhibition Images
> View Miller's Opening Images

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