Edward Cella Art + Architecture Shows a Solo Exhibition by Contemporary Artist Brad Miller

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Edward Cella Art + Architecture is presenting a solo exhibition of a trilogy of new works by contemporary artist and sculptor Brad Miller. Using the elements of clay, wood and fire, Miller creates three interconnected yet discrete bodies of work that suggest the life generating systems found in nature. His installation of branching porcelain sculptures, burned wood panels inscribed with bisymmetric forms, and carved clay vessels evoke the cellular patterns that are the very genesis of life.

Miller transforms the gallery into a laboratory to construct and present his insights into the fundamental mechanisms of existence. A naturalist at heart, Miller continues to build upon these universal relationships which have appeared in various contexts throughout his career. Immersive in scale and yet all together new in form; Miller engages the viewer in an experimental journey traversing fire, water, earth and sentient cells. Offering compelling evidence of his own evolutionary theory, he juxtaposes sultry and bisymmetric patterns on burned wood panels against a reef of coral-like porcelain branching forms. Opposite these are polished clay vessels that call to mind cellular or atomic structures.

Using a vocabulary of ceramics, steel and wood to manipulate and construct his creations, Miller harnesses and applies fire as the catalyst to transform each medium. It is this proclivity that mirrors the earth’s own volatile birth of primordial formations. To recreate both the subtle and explosive quality entailed in such processes; Miller has spent years experimenting and refining his techniques to serve his creative objectives, including creating his own kiln and experimenting with a range of butane torches. Unified in concept, each component represented in the exhibition has, at one point or another, been subjected to burning, polishing, tumbling, or carving.

Brad Miller has exhibited nationally, and his work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian. Primordial Algorithms is the second solo exhibition in Los Angeles for the artist, following more than thirty years after his debut at the Craft and Folk Art Museum for which Buckminster Fuller wrote, “When I encounter work so conceptualized and communicated as that of Bradley Miller’s, I hasten to bid others to observe his work and I am confident that they too will be equally inspired by it”. The same museum will feature his work in their upcoming Pacific Time exhibition entitled, The Golden State of Craft: California 1960s – 1980s. Brad Miller pursued his graduate studies at the University of Oregon. Miller was the executive director of Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, CO from 1984 to 1992. He currently maintains a studio in Venice Beach, CA.