"Une exposition dans un petite hangar"
Vivienne Miller
Vivienne Miller's exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia's adjunct space could be seen as a preview of work to come, or as a mid-term report on activities ongoing. 11 showed work done, work begun, work more or less complete, almost nothing that seemed, strictly speaking, definitively finished. I expect rather than presaging things to come it will be seen to represent merely a stage passed through. But which strands will have been continued and developed, which allowed drop? Miller is a young art-school product not long graduated. Canny, cool, circumspect-or suspected of all three-Miller curated with Bridge! Currie the exhibition Girls last year, a show that seemed coolly un-cool, canny in its choice of artists (who were male and female), and which put no feet conspicuously wrong. Miller's work in Une exposition was at least in part continuous with some aspects of Girls: an interest in social roles, in the range of forms youth culture provides for the selfs projection- and an amused interest in the ironies afforded in this mix. The exhibition established the range of formal means Miller is working, and it revealed totally other interests as well. The works were all two dimensional: paintings and watercolours. Most were figurative, a few non-figurative-abstractions made up of art-deco-ish chevrons, fan shapes and Wurlitzer patterns. The revisited art deco of the 1970s. The colour scheme for these and many of the other works was along a muted pink/blue axis with rather anaemic challenge from diluted oranges, yellows, greens and more of the blue and pink via kindred mauves, purples, blues and watery crimsons. One of the few exceptions to this was Heartbreaker, a three-quarter figure, T –shirted hunk derived from Michelangelo's David, made look comically sweet and dumbly fleshyfaced. Quite a dark picture, painted as from below, the view of the implicit, swept-away admirer, or perhaps one merely considering her options. A number of the more fully elaborated works showed young couples in domestic scenes. Where the abstracts seemed to tightly control a rather limited amount of action these figurative pictures seemed to me rather uncertain. The figures reminded of Conde/Beveridge's deadpan propaganda cartoons of the '70s, a little inert and bland, with a sort of paint-by-numbers or comic-strip feel to them. I found these far less interesting as pictures-than the highly organised, rather over-elaborated compositions of the abstract paintings, Soft Rock and Padded