Shop Till You Drop
Get out of the malls and get a life.
California artist Michael Barton Miller expresses that message in graphite-and-paper illustrations at the Greenlease Gallery. The show’s title — Extreme Extra Extra Large — may refer to ever-expanding malls or to the size of their shoppers or to Miller’s oversized drawings (most of which are around 70 inches by 80 inches). But one thing is clear: Shopping is more than a benign, escapist activity. Miller makes this point in subtle ways, but his criticism is harsh and heartfelt.
His seven drawings are remarkably similar, gracefully rendered with pencil on white paper. Miller depicts human subjects as tribal in their behavior, but the ancestral act of hunting and gathering has been reduced to lethargically dragging feet through miles of carpeted and overly lighted landscapes where time and place are disconnected from anything real. His figures are surrounded by many others that are just like them but remain alone.
Miller is just as critical of the architecture as the activity, and he examines how both are intertwined with a nation’s values. For his drawings, Miller selects a site the way an anthropologist might, taking hundreds of photographs to create a composite. One picture becomes a microcosm of a world; all of the works are separate but interrelated. Generally, to examine one picture is to see all of them. (The austere “Spirit House” is an exception.)
In “Santa Maria,” Miller mixes attendees of the Deep Sea Adventure at the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta (rumored to be the largest mall in the world and home to the world’s largest parking lot), with the historical ship. Placing the vessel used to explore the New World squarely in front of bored observers, Miller implies that they’d rather gawk at captive fish while ignoring history. “Central Mall Pin Klao” features a Z-shape of escalator riders at various malls in Bangkok. (Miller observed the culture during an exchange program in 2002.) Most of the shoppers’ faces aren’t visible, creating a sense of the herd’s anonymity. Almost everyone in the frame is talking on a cell phone, communicating with those far away from them but unwilling to speak to people standing right next to them.
In “As Above, So Below,” Miller alters perspective by showing shoppers from above and other conflicting angles. This world is anything but “perfect,” the word emblazoned on a woman’s shirt and the frame’s only text. Joylessness is obvious on the faces of the people caught in mundane activities: A girl sips a cup of coffee, and a man examines his camera. In a rare moment of intimacy, an elderly man pushes his wife in a wheelchair. Closeness also shows up in small gestures — a man hugs a woman close to him; another man, with dreadlocks, reaches behind him with an open palm as if searching for a hand to grasp; elsewhere, two friends share a joke.
In sharp contrast to all of this is “Spirit House.” It’s outdoors, there’s a sense of history in the design, and real people sell things made by their own hands. This is Miller’s preferred style of architecture, also on display in his one-hour looped DVD “Night and Day Market,” in which the organic feeling of shopping outdoors at night on lively streets is palpable.
Miller’s other video work, “Arrivals and Departures” (also an hour long), gives motion to his more frequent themes. It features a shopping mall in Thailand. Slow dissolves connect the images, and there’s a white noise of constant hum and chatter — the sounds are the same, no matter the language. Here, the hermetic feeling of mall space is tangible and scary.
Most of us aren’t even aware that we exist in such a space. “Not only are people like sheep,” Miller says of the mall’s hypnotic influence on its denizens, “but adults are made into children.” Bodies never touch, and there is no dirt, no natural light, no discomfort and no sign of life.
Go ahead. Go shopping.
Michael Barton Miller: Extreme Extra, Extra Large, through April 1 (but closed until March 10 for spring break) at the Greenlease Gallery, Rockhurst University, 54th Street and Troost Avenue, 816-501-4407.
