View Inside: Matt Miller

There’s not a Borges story in which an artist who uses various forms of variably manipulable packing materials to create his works begins, over time, to amass enough works and works-in-progress in his studio that he finds himself veritably packed into their midst, as if he were a sort of fragile product whose safe conveyance relies on the material integrity of all such polychemically puffed, polychromatically embellished surroundings—with the surrounding works, meanwhile, relying on his presence and agency as amasser, manipulator and spatial reconfigurer to ensure their regenerative survival as materials, and their capacity to fit and formally function among one another.

If there were such a story, though, and it were to go on, then at some point some greater entity, perhaps, would open up the artist’s studio from above, as if opening up the roof like the top of a box, and therein that entity would find a great many skillfully crafted and conceptually cogent artworks by an artist named Matt Miller. And once that entity removed all the packing materials, which in this case would be those artworks, then she/he/it would eventually find Mr. Miller in the middle.

This thought came to mind when I visited Matt in his Bushwick studio, where we chatted about the arguable challenges of mounting art shows, the arguable joys of deinstalling exhibitions, and the somewhat inarguable thrill of burning styrofoam. Then another artist showed up, a certain James Prez, and for some reason the conversation shifted rather readily into the territories of beer, stitches and basketball, and then back to beer again.

Perhaps the conjectural Borges story should feature beer, too. A brew that’s so beerily consummate that it somehow drinks itself as its would-be-drinkers raise pints thereof to their lips. Tragic.

Anyway, the image above is a but one expansive photo of Matt’s work and studio. Matt is the fellow on the left. James Prez is the fellow on the right. To see more of Matt’s work, visit his website.