Harland Miller Biography

Interested in canonical authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway and drawing influence from Ed Ruscha, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer and Robert Rauschenberg, Miller pointedly combines text and images to comment on the frequent disconnect between representation and reality. For one series of paintings, he transformed canvases into satirical Penquin book covers, inventing keenly witty titles like The Me I Never Knew (2009) to send up classical literary motifs. The often torturous process of writing itself is the subject of another series in which Miller covers vintage typewriters with splashes of paint, giving the works titles like, Writing is easy all you need to do is feed in a sheet of white A4 paper and stare at it till your forehead bleeds (2009).