Liz Miller is the sort of artist-conjurer who somehow can turn felt, fabric, rope and paint into some sort of cross between a dazzling store window diorama and a lacy cartoon fairy tale landscape in which abstracted clouds and mountains magically drift through the sky.
The swooning, ecstatic effect the artist—who resides in Good Thunder, Minnesota—aims for in her “elaborate, abstract fictions” can be discerned from the titles of some of her installations: “Acrimonious Efflorescence,” “Requisite Beguilement, “Meretricious Restraint,” “Rapturous Decay,” “Miasmatic Filigree.”
For “Mendacious Veracity,” her exhibition on view at Portland’s Space Gallery from Nov. 1, 2017, to Jan. 6, 2018, the gallery reports, “Miller creates a landscape of non-objective, draping textile forms interspersed with and responding to rigid, rectilinear platforms anchored at various levels throughout the space. The play between hard and soft materials combined with the materials’ various surface qualities and relatively low-tech construction methods reinforces the artifice of the sculptural environment, reminding viewers that any illusion is fleeting. While the forms in the installation are not instantly recognizable and do not bear reference to one specific set of imagery, they can certainly be read as beautiful, absurd, poetic, and even menacing at times. The alternate interpretations and possibilities in these seemingly simple shapes is a continual source of inspiration. The viewer completes the experience, becoming a participant in a large-scale fiction, moving through the work’s various facets as an actor on a stage set, each audience member a character in a beautiful impossibility.”
