Miller 

Curator: Before us is “Miller” by Devin Leonardi, a mixed-media piece incorporating photography. It’s strikingly haunting. Editor: Haunting is right. The darkness, that flat, almost sepia-toned foreground... It feels heavy, burdened. The eye struggles to find a point of rest, drawn instead to the contrasting sharp angles of the buildings against the amorphous, dark sky. Curator: Consider the title: "Miller." The figure likely represents the ancestral figure of the first Americans who colonized the American West in the 1800s. I interpret the dilapidated buildings, like a ghost town, as symbolizing decline. This reading is heightened by the shadowy figure that looks at the seated female subject through a window. The subject’s costume is an allusion to Victorian England, but what does that say of America’s cultural memory and loss? Editor: The interplay of texture is compelling: the roughness of what appears to be a simple shack constructed of what materials might be locally at hand against the elaborate dress of the seated woman, illuminated by the doorway. This sharp juxtaposition adds a surreal layer, but what does it really signify? Curator: We are looking at a meditation on temporality—past, present, and possible futures, symbolized through dress, construction, and the presence of the single deer in the space of humanity, which becomes its own icon in our unfolding narrative. Editor: Yet this deer also is so carefully posed that I suspect this piece is in many ways, a performance staged to evoke a sense of abandonment—constructed and not quite authentic. See the composition. The slight imbalance is not unintentional, adding to the destabilizing feeling we spoke about. The artist is intentionally making a statement. Curator: That touches upon the genius of the image. The image works in and through its visual components, beckoning, teasing, demanding from us to see, to question. Editor: Absolutely. It's a powerful, if unsettling, experience. "Miller," like a good poem, invites return visits to unpack its density.