KMart66

Kirk Miller has been making sculpture and installations for over thirty years, and the images shown here represent highlights from this body of work. As seen here and on the home page, the chronological order of their production is mixed up with the intention that it will provide the viewer an opportunity to make new connections between works from different periods in his career, and allow him or her the opportunity to develop their own unique dialogues with the objects.

Kirk Miller's practice is a blend of Minimalism and Conceptualism laced with a droll sense of humor and a tendency towards tongue-in-cheek visual puns that still manage to service a desire to investigate existential and ontological concerns. As a conceptual artist, the notions of nothingness (no-thing-ness) and emptiness have comprised a constant area of interest for him. Originally inspired by the absurdist theater of Ionesco and Beckett, in which human existence is shown to have no real meaning or purpose, his early works focused on nothingness as a negation, specifically the negation of death after all meaning has been emptied from life, a simulacrum, an 'exquisite corpse.' However, in his more recent works, like "sacredTextSacredSpace" and "Fragile," his interest in nothingness has evolved to become the nothingness of pure zero and of 'boundless possibility.' Rather than a negation, he now sees this 'stripping away' as an opening, a potentiality. The nested crates of "Fragile," existing somewhere between a Pandora's box and a wooden coffin, playfully blur the lines between art and frame, a physical manifestation of Derrida's 'parergon.' Contained within both the enclosed and the cascading variations of the boxes sit a core cube with laser-cut redacted religious text fragments, two six-sided dice with completely arbitrary I-Ching charts, suggesting that both change and chance are effectively synonymous.