Virtual Volume

“Nicolas G. Miller’s trio of hosiery gift boxes derive from three different department stores that occupied the same address in downtown L.A. (3050 Wilshire Blvd.) at different points in time: Bullocks, Bullocks Wilshire, and I. Magnin. At first glance, the work reads as a straightforward, if elaborately executed consumer fetish that partakes in systems of circulation and exchange. But if the rhythms of fashion ultimately index not merely seasonal cycles but forms of historical self-consciousness, Miller’s interest in how this unfolds in Los Angeles—a place that has long been unjustly maligned as “post-historical,” it becomes clear that the real stakes of the work lie elsewhere. In an important metaphysical sense, Miller’s works are not boxes but sculptures of boxes that are (to use a term favored by Charles Ray) embedded in space and time in such a way that has both everything and nothing to do with the specific location of 3050 Wilshire Blvd. Although the sculptures are self-contained monads, we are invited to enter them kinesthetically through sculptural passages of startling complexity like the edge of a lotus petal or the canyon of elevated letters in a logo. Relief plays a key role in shaping this dynamic, translating the two-dimensional, graphic intensity of the iconography and text on the original boxes into three-dimensional, digitally modeled forms. Color, although applied with a matte finish resembling the fondant decoration of a cake, is hardly a secondary skin of the work but creates subtle contrasts of light and shadow that shape our perception of space. By displaying his reliefs on a pedestal, Miller blurs the distinction between the furniture of the gallery and the department store, and in turn the philosophical distinction between things and objects. For Miller, thinking sculpturally means thinking inside the box.”