Neon Parc | Freedom Can Be Measured

Viv Miller
‘Freedom Can Be Measured’

South Yarra
3 May.–1 Jun.
2024

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Neon Parc is excited to announce, ‘Freedom Can Be Measured’, a solo exhibition by Viv Miller at the South Yarra gallery.

For her seventh solo show with Neon Parc, Viv Miller assembles a collection of idyllic landscapes, birds, rainbows, silhouetted figures, abstract systems, looming suns and burning branches. Through her own language of motifs, patterns and forms, Miller presents a vision of the world which is bright in colour and high in imagination.

Viv Miller’s work has always held a fascination with artificiality. The serene imagery evokes hope and renewal, but almost verges on synthetic or façade. A tone of cynicism underscores the work as though questioning whether the rainbows and birds of ‘Rainbow face’, 2023, are too good to be true. Miller’s paintings combine these saccharine depictions of nature with abstracted and geometric segments which allude to pixels, almost as if depicting a simulation. The geometric patterning imitates video games and digital animations, which feels incongruous with the precision of Miller’s brushstrokes that indicate the painstaking labour of crafting such detailed imagery.

Viv Miller, 'Fireplace', 2023. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 61 x 50 cm.

Her otherworldly green clouds, blue leaves or pink suns reveal the fractured logic her universe upholds. Allowing colour play to be at the centre of these works – Miller’s contrasting palettes create vibrant scenes of multicoloured illusion. ‘In flames’, 2024, merges the red and green trees with the flames that rage through them. The depth within the forest sitting against the flatness of the sky. ‘Faraway’ 2022, renders rolling hills in differing geometric patterns in an array of purples, blues and greens. Branches of scrawny twigs and dappled leaves hang overhead. A tiny yellow sun sits in a sky of fading lilac.

Grid variations of pastel tiles layer in ‘Arms folded’, 2022, together building a figure holding its arms around itself, the background, the body parts, all having their own glitchy, gridded logics. ‘Fireplace’, 2023, depicts a comforting and familiar winter setting, a gradation of colour moving throughout the bricks. But the vertical yellow and lilac stripes conjure the idea of another world sitting just behind the flames – perhaps hinting towards another dimension.

Miller describes the exhibition’s title ‘Freedom Can Be Measured’ as a background hum which helped propel this body of work. Of the contradictory statement she says “Freedom should be boundless. Measurements decree boundaries. And yet, it feels right for our times, I think. Life measured in sets of data points.”

Biography Viv Miller

Viv Miller (b.1979 Melbourne/Naarm) makes drawings, paintings and animations. Moving between abstraction and realism, her paintings and drawings test out ways of forming images and representations of things, characterised by a somewhat synthetic aesthetic. Miller completed a Master of Fine Arts with the VCA, 2014, and a Bachelor of Visual Arts with the Uni of SA, 2001.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Drawings dense and slim’, Gallery 9, Sydney, 2021 and ‘Folk’, Neon Parc, 2018.

Selected group exhibitions include ‘Ramsay Art Prize 2019’, Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Analogue art in a digital world’, RMIT Gallery, 2018, ‘Dancing Umbrellas’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2016, ‘2016 Geelong contemporary art prize’, Geelong Gallery. Miller’s work is held in various collections in Australia and overseas, including Artbank, Fidelity, UK, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, RACV and Proclaim, Melbourne.