Ryan Peter Miller

Born in West Lafayette, Indiana in 1978, Ryan Peter Miller was destined for existence. From his physical conception in the latter months of 1977, his parents knew they were having a baby. And so he was. The stars had conspired to deliver this formative man-child to the physical plane in time to see The Empire Strikes Back in the theater. This fortuitous event certainly secured his righteous place in dorkdom. As a frequently friendless nerd, Ryan developed an unusually close bond with his pets and animals at large. It was also his latent nerd tendencies that drew him towards the solitary act of art making. From Indiana to Georgia to Arizona, Ryan has committed himself to making sense of the senseless through paint and occasional spells of hard work. He is terribly humble and audaciously modest: and through it all he has never failed to loose sight of his own magnificence.

Ryan Peter Miller objectifies painting. His self-described "AIN'TINGS" are post-ironic, post-historical, and a poster child for contemporary painting. The concepts that define the discipline of painting are as malleable as the material. His recent body of work revels in the expansive breadth of paint. It is an ontological investigation, a deconstruction of the discipline of painting into essential signifiers and historical structures needed to make the phenomena of paint function within our contemporary visual culture. The material has been pushed in exaggerated and absurd directions. Process has been separated from the material, removed, reimagined, and reapplied. The structure is stripped away from the paint and the paint is unapplied to the structure. Paint is the material and the subject. This body of work is the story of painting as told by acrylic paint, a plastic, non-linear story. It is the democratic ground on which hundreds of years of painting progress now strive for parity.