labland
The Labland world created by Vera Miller is an alternate, albeit parallel, reflection of our own, that continues the artist's preoccupation with human interaction and abstraction of the natural world. Belying the cute look, the exhibition is an acute hermeneutic investigation into the complexities of how mimesis mediates our experience and knowledge of the world. Through an ambiguous visual morphology combining object and image, the exhibition invites both narrative and epistemological speculation.
The genesis of the project was a chance encounter between newly born mice and small biomorphic sculptures in the artist's studio. This natural intervention into Miller's practice was unheralded, and although unplanned, offered poetic potential in an area in which her practice is already situated. Prior to training as an artist in Melbourne, Miller studied (micro)biology and theology in Wurzburg and Munich, Germany. This conjunction of art, life, science and faith has been an ongoing point of reference in her artistic operations and it finds consummate articulation in the diminutive world of La bland where the natural and artificial eloquently coalesce.
To begin with, the cool-white minimalism of the installation seems traditionally conservative, however within the context of the exhibition the spatial organisation appears to parody the natural history museum. Miller achieves this through the appropriation of nineteenth century museological display conventions in which her biomorphic sculptures are exhibited on a vitrine style surface and juxtaposed with photographs of their interaction with the baby mice. Whether artistic or scientific, the museum legislates figurative and theoretical narratives of how we gain knowledge and thus moderate our position in the world. Miller's critique of this site appears aimed at the anthropomorphic contingencies that underpin the institution of the museum, which