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Jeremy Millar

Amongst Others

28 May – 25 July 2010

Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre

Amongst Others presents a collection of works by the British artist Jeremy Millar. The exhibition draws together new pieces by the artist with earlier series to explore intersecting narratives of art and belief. Working in a broad range of media, Millar’s practice excavates the history of cultural production and marks breaks with consensual thinking through processes of speculation. Identifying fissures across time and space, Millar ruminates on how possibilities from one place or time can be reconfigured in the present.

Throughout his artistic practice, Millar collides the belief-led systems of magic and art, drawing these two irrational structures of understanding together to underline their power to interpret and engage with the world that surrounds us. Millar places his work amongst the cultural production of others — from channelling the avant-garde writer and photographer Stanislaw Witkiewicz in a series of portraits (As Witkiewicz, 2009); to invoking a ritual used the Kongo people on to a minimal ‘primary form’ (Object to be awakened, 2009); through to a series of photographs taking inspiration from a short story of a captured sorcerer by Jorge Luis Borges (The Mirror of Ink (sinister), 2007); and a destroyed recording of a conversation with the British novelist JG Ballard (Erased Ballard Interview, 1996).

At the centre of this exhibition are two commissioned works by Plymouth Arts Centre: Untitled (Mirror Cubes) and Incomplete Open Cubes (Burnt). The sculptures explore the relationship between ritual systems and the recent history of American conceptual and minimal art practices that established contemporary understandings of art as a negotiation between idea and object. These ‘cube’ works are based on Robert Morris’ Mirror Cubes (1965) and Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (a serial project, begun in 1974).

The third new work is Tokinana sola Bosubasoba and Tristan und Iseult, a film recounting the oft-reworked medieval love-romance Tristan and Isolde. In Millar’s version, the poet and playwright Chief John Kasaipwalova re-tells the story, speaking the language of his native Kiriwina, a small island off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. As the narrative unfolds, it is woven into the creation myths of the region. Developed during Millar’s 2009 research into the forms of magic studied by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, the film was shot in a sacred cave, a place that echoes the site in which Tristan and Isolde themselves are said to have sought refuge.

About the artist
Jeremy Millar is an artist living in Whitstable and he is currently AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad including Tramway, Glasgow; CCA, Vilnius; Rooseum, Malmš; Bloomberg Space, London; and the Metropole Galleries, Folkestone. His recent exhibitions and screenings include Plum Tree Blossom, commissioned by Inverleith House, Edinburgh; the Vigeland Museum in Oslo; and Tate Modern, London. A permanent public work was installed in Folkestone in 2006. A monograph on his work, Zugzwang (almost complete), with an essay by Brian Dillon, was published in 2006. He is currently developing the exhibition Every Day is a Good Day for Hayward Touring, which will be the largest exhibition to date of the visual art of John Cage, opening at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead in 2010.

About the curator
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer based in London. She is senior lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, commissioning work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renée Green and Jeremy Millar. In 2009 she curated the exhibitions ‘Joachim Koester: Poison Protocols and Other Histories’ at Stills, Edinburgh and ‘Economies of Attention’ from the Arts Council of England Collection. In 2010-11 she will co-curate ‘British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet’ (with Tom Morton) and ‘Alexander and Susan Maris: The pursuit of Fidelity (A Retrospective)’ at Stills. Her edited book ‘Failure’, published by MIT Press/Whitechapel Art Gallery, is published in May.

With thanks to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

Press enquiries: contact Hannah Prothero, Marketing & Communications Manager, Plymouth Arts Centre, phone: 01752 276990, email: hannah@plymouthartscentre.org
 

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Image: Jeremy Millar,Tokinana sola Bosubasoba and Tristan und Iseult, 2009.Courtesy and copyright of Jeremy Millar.

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Image: Jeremy Millar, The Mirror of Ink (sinister), 2007. Courtesy and copyright of Jeremy Millar.

Image: Jeremy Millar, As Witkiewicz (Gumakawai Sitautau, Chief, Osusupa Clan) 2009. Courtesy and copyright of Jeremy Millar.

Image: Jeremy Millar, As Witkiewicz (Smoke, Garden Magic, Bweka), 2009. Courtesy and copyright of Jeremy Millar.