GLEN MILLER

website | http://www.glenmiller.net

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Glen Miller's current body of work incorporates several interrelated themes drawn from personal experience. The imagery for this work is largely from his experiences wandering the mountain trails and his Southern Appalachian roots. The work reflects Miller's love for natural design and native flora, his interest in the human connection to the natural world, and questioning the often disconnected inventions of culture that we use to give meaning to our lives. Glen's goal is not to record actual experience but to create images which suggest the moment, the remembered, the residual, the elements that become story. Often these are quiet places far removed from the constructs of society.  

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In these works, Miller combines the figure and elements of the native landscape in a suggested narrative context, one that encourages the viewer to observe slowly, to investigate, and to question. Glen incorporates aesthetic concepts he draws from the natural world such as “every square inch is something,” and the purposeful interaction of all the elements.  

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The characters in Glen's work are almost always fictional. The settings are constructed from natural elements encountered in his wanderings, although, they are often from very different times and places. Miller has come to think of  the process itself as metaphor, creating fictions from selected truths. Although he would like the work to engage the viewer on a personal level, he finds some relevance to the current state of affairs as well. As he writes this, we are in a precarious and vulnerable situation giving us reason to consider our connection to the natural world as significant as our connection to an invented world, our cultural differences as less meaningful than our shared human experience, and reason for quiet reflection. Ideally, the viewer will determine what is taken away from the work. 

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BIO

Glen Miller has a BFA in drawing and painting from East Tennessee State University and an MA in Studio Art and Education from the University of South Florida with further graduate study from the University of Tennessee. A native of East Tennessee, Glen began his teaching career in South Carolina in 1979. Glen was a public school art teacher for seventeen years, taught adult classes and workshops, and taught at the university level for 20 years. Since his first solo exhibition at Hampton III Gallery in 2003 the artist has had 23 solo exhibitions and has been represented in many group and juried exhibitions and is represented in several personal and academic collections. The artist currently maintains a studio near Travelers Rest, SC, and is represented locally by Hampton III Gallery in Greenville, SC. 

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