Nathan Miner
Echoes Embrace My work derives from a basic theory of interconnectedness and uncertainty in the world. In a society obsessed with factual data, my mixed-media paintings alternatively nurture a romance with the unknown. Although drawn from my intuition, each mark - executed with clear intention and a sense of purpose - represents a manifestation of my inner self, and a testament to the belief in the artistic act of being. The resultant creations can be read as abstract interpretations of the external world, as well as of the interior dimensions of the psyche. They represent the sinuous fibers that stretch between the internal world of the imagination and the external world of our surrounding universe, questioning with each stroke if any boundaries can be delineated. Ultimately, this work is about this clash and the mutability of self-reflexive thought. When forces emerging from the internal mental landscape (in the form of projected ideas and preconceived notions about reality) collide with the demands of the actual world (expressed as perceivable form), limitlessness erupts within the moment and the instant becomes eternal.
What if you could stand in front of a mirror and, instead of seeing yourself, you only see deep space? What if the static concept of self could evaporate, blending seamlessly into the surrounding stream of energy that knows no boundaries and where time does not exist? The idea of the self-moving soul is compelling, but really we are just a surface illusion on a sea of cognitive depth. The focus of my recent work is imagery derived from looking down at airport runways and the unique perspectives offered by flight. From take-off to landing we are extracted from terra firma and returned to another place. This is a time for reflection and anticipation, when visions are projected and dreams are born. In flying, we are suspended and displaced; from take-off to landing we are extracted and reborn. Each flight is an opportunity, each departure and arrival a change in state. These qualities of flight are natural partners for my work. My newest abstractions are set afloat in a space that exists some 30,000 feet above ground.
Artist Statement, January 14, 2012
Echoes Embrace, 2011, Detail
Echoes Embrace, 2011 80” x 240”
Pencil, watercolor, gouache, airbrush and acrylic paint, with shellac and oil paint on twelve panels
Echoes Embrace Nathan Miner’s colossal mixed-media paint-
ing, Echoes Embrace, 2011, is composed of twelve adjacent 40” x 40” panels, bisected at midpoint by the corner of the gallery space. 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 lies 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.
Essay by Francine Koslow Miller, PhD
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,
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
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
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.
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 that 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,
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, PhD January 29, 2012 1 2
Artist Statement, January 14, 2012 Nathan Miner, interview with the author, January 23, 2012
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