Gardner Cole Miller

European art history and middle-class domestic kitsch cannon into each other via invocations of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1770) manifested in press-molded ceramic figurines mounted directly to the wall in a direct occupation of architectural space. The Blue Boy, with his eternally youthful, feminized features has frequently been deployed as an iconic signifier of gay subculture. Cast from a secondhand, store-found original, variations on this appropriated theme realize material corporeality in porcelain, terracotta, stoneware, and amalgams of other concocted bodies. The surfaces of the individual are varied by interventions with nails, ceramic shards, latex, salt, and glazes, in an act of erasure and activation. Both singular and specific, the figurine’s original identity is becoming recontextualized. These hybridized forms seek to embody liminality and absence as the mold breaks down with each subsequent casting, speaking directly to the flux and fluidity within creolized cultural spaces as well as queer bodies in space. 

An electric power drill outfitted with a charkha spindle instead of a drill bit becomes a hybridized inter/in-vention providing the mechanism for crafting cotton thread hand-spun from store-bought, cosmetic cotton balls that have been prepared using antique carding combs originally used in a 19th Century, proto-industrial setting. The tension created between the physical presence of the performing body, juxtaposed against the historically loaded pasts of the materials, process, and means of production. This project mediates the distant spaces between labor and consumption, economy and agency, culture and appropriation, and power and its many imbalances.

Antique quilt remnants crafted by unknown makers in various states of deterioration with threadbare fabrics shredding at their seams, and leaking their cotton batting. Fractions and fragments of their former embodiments, the faded and stained cloth contains an archive unto itself. In a gesture that is at once a calculated attempt at erasure and a willful resistance to such a process, the quilts are repeatedly over-dyed with indigo in an act of accumulation upon the object’s surface. Multiple immersions into the dye vat translate the calico patchworks into a field of activated blue surface. All that remains of the original object are the colored fabrics darker than the indigo, the texture of the quilts’ surface revealing a topographic patchwork, and lines of stitching charting an aquatic non-space marked by an archipelago of rips, tears, and fissures between and among the quilts. Despite the fractured quilt remnants being pieced together into a larger cartography (or perhaps hydrography) they exist as such only temporarily; held together loosely with pins, the whole rests in a solid but transient state. Never permanently fixed; unfinished, overworn.