Kirk Miller art

"To study the way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 things."
Eihei Dogen

Kirk Miller has been making art 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 viewers an opportunity to make new connections between works from different periods in his career, and allow them the opportunity to develop their own unique dialogue with the objects.

As a conceptual artist, the notions of nothingness (no-thing-ness) and emptiness have comprised a constant area of interest for Kirk. Initially 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, precisely 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 entirely arbitrary I-Ching charts, suggesting that both change and chance are effectively synonymous.