Battered pieces of drywall, frosted glass, metal and wood fill the space of Laura Miller's show. Heaps of materials seem to belong to an unfinished building project: nails and wood scraps still scatter the floor, and c-clamps hold makeshift walls together.
This seeming unfinished mess offers a thoughtful rumination on the process of generation. Laura's appropriation of discarded construction materials for art offers an unexpectedly hopeful message of growth. She builds new edifices out of the remnants of broken buildings, but not literal ones. Laura's constructions seem like houses of possibility: the funny, lovely moments that emerge from her rubble (light reflecting off of copper, a piece of peeling blue tape) speak to what could emerge. Laura reminds us of the beauty that grows out of common detritus. Decay invariably leads to growth, but humans can guide this process.
This hope for regeneration culminates in a semi-complete tower hiding behind the curved corner of the gallery. The tower, constructed of white wood fragments, teeters from floor to ceiling. It immediately reminded me of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. Tatlin intended his tower of industrial materials to be the centerpiece of Communist Russia. He sacrificed building practicality to his perfect vision, however; his tower, like the Communist Utopia, could never be realized.
Laura's makeshift version offers an alternative to Tatlin's utopian perfectionism. A white tower must symbolize a beacon of hope, yet Laura's is fragmented and unstable. Laura refreshes Constructivism by fracturing it, suggesting that new spaces are fragile restructurings of old ones. I ran into Laura after seeing her show. She told me that she planned to continue playing with the materials over the course of the week that her show would be up. This seemed fitting: for Laura, creation is an incomplete process of change. The final dismantling of Laura's show will not be its end, just another step in her constructive process.
-Rina
*Edited on 4-10 at author's request
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