Other pieces experiment with form and the way colors play against one another. In "o (21)," she uses blue and red dots to create three tones in the blue-red spectrum. Bright blue circles hover around snaking paths of red, surrounded by a more even mix. It reads like a map of an energy field, warm here and cool there, all abuzz.
The artist's remarkable video "o (22)" most dramatically throws vision into a new light. It features several dozen dotted drawings flashing through the frame at a ridiculous speed. The drawings are alike; they all have a central horizontal bar. But attempting to replicate one by hand must be akin to trying to array strands of hair in exactly the same place you had them yesterday.
The video's speed repels the eye's desire to make sense of what it sees, yet the eye persists. I found a tiny circle that seems to stay in place, spinning, sending other dots pinwheeling out from it. Squiggles swim upward like tadpoles. Forms churn and disperse. Just as I made sense of some small image, it would vanish, and even though the drawings are on a loop, I couldn't find it again.
Miller builds her drawings by making the same marks again and again. In the video, she offers roughly the same drawing, again and again. Within that sameness, she shows us wild variation and hypnotic correspondences. That tension between obsessive similarity and inherent differences can make looking at her work nearly as compulsive as their creation must have been.
State of decay Lori Nix makes model worlds and photographs them with dramatic lighting, creating images that are strangely perfect, even when the scenes she depicts are in disarray, as they are in the post-apocalyptic series she now has up at Miller Block Gallery. Many of the photos depict places that we may think of as timeless - repositories of culture that have long been around, that we don't expect to go away. A museum, an aquarium, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
