Art News

Artist John Miller transforms Metro Pictures into a bizarre yet familiar public space

NEW YORK, NY.- John Miller elaborates on many of the tropes he has masterfully cultivated throughout his thirty-plus year career in “Suburban Past Time,” his latest exhibition at Metro Pictures. Through artificial rocks and plants ranging in scale from massive to ordinary, wallpaper, store-bought and handmade decorative elements, Miller transforms the gallery into a bizarre yet familiar public space. The works included in the exhibition are a continuation of the artist’s ongoing sociological investigation into so-called middlebrow culture, which focus on artifice in Western consumer societies. To evoke a sense of the generic, Miller pastes two vector print wallpapers depicting exterior views of nondescript plattenbauten, or apartment blocks, in Berlin and a beach resort on the working class tourist island of Mallorca, Spain. With the wallpapers are two carpets spelling “NO,” filing cabine