Dan Miller: Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan
September 6 - October 19, 2024
Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announce Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan, its third solo exhibition of works by California-based artist Dan Miller (b. 1961). A thirty-two-year veteran of Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, the pioneering non-profit serving artists with disabilities, Miller has exhibited his work widely, initially within the Outsider Art community and subsequently at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Glossolalia, 2008), the Venice Biennale (Viva Arte Viva, 2017), and currently SFMOMA (Creative Growth: The House that Art Built, 2024).
Diagnosed with autism, Miller is mostly nonverbal. He works ambidextrously with intense, frenetic concentration, obsessively layering words or phrases until their legibility is obliterated. In the period leading up to Venice (2017), Miller began to create on a larger, and in some cases, monumental scale. This exhibition features a slew of recent large-scale acrylic and ink works on paper, highlighted by an imposing horizontal piece from 2022 measuring over thirteen feet in length. A painted navy blue and black background is punctuated by slashing yellow lines and scrawled, readable words like “fan” and “socket.” As is overwhelmingly the case with Miller’s work, most of his imagery is indecipherable, however, in several mid-sized compositions, he repeatedly renders the identifiable outline of a light bulb.
In addition to the artist’s heavily painted works, the exhibition includes a select group of delicate ballpoint pen drawings. Where lone words appear to float to the surface in the painted pieces, these smaller monochromatic compositions achieve total abstraction. Symbols are totally obscured within shifting fields of color that emit an almost electromagnetic quality.
Miller’s art is included in the permanent collections of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, CA, the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., among others. In 2018, the artist was featured in the documentary series, Art in the Twenty-first Century, produced by Art 21.
The gallery will also feature Miller’s art at Art Basel Paris, from October 16-20, in a three-artist presentation with works by Forrest Bess (1911-1977) and Melvin Way (1954-1974).