Work
Press Release
REVIEW: David Roth, Squarecylinder.com – “Though these works couldn’t be more dissimilar, their formation in a grid unites them, revealing a compositional acuity that is Brown’s alone. I count him among the most innovative abstract painters operating today…”
JULIA COUZENS BLOG POST: Julia Couzens, Dramas of Ravishment: Christopher Miles Ceramic sculpture – “To the extent Miles’s sculpture represents disfigurement and eroticized physicality, he is arguably the David Cronenberg of contemporary ceramics… ”
Brad Brown | Christopher Miles
Reception: Saturday, January 11, 3:00 to 5:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: 11 January – 22 February 2020
➤ In Conversation: Saturday, January 11th at 2:00 pm – Christopher Miles will talk about his career in Los Angeles as artist, writer, educator and curator.
➤ Gallery Walk-Through: Saturday, February 1st at 12:00 pm – Brad Brown will lead us through the exhibition discussing his studio practice with open-ended work.
PSG presents San Francisco artist Brad Brown’s intimately scaled mixed media paintings and Los Angeles artist Christopher Miles’ multi-faceted abstract ceramic sculptures. The exhibition opens Saturday, January 11th and continues through February 22nd. The reception is Saturday, January 11th from 3:00 to 5:00 pm. At 2:00 pm on Saturday, January 11th, Christopher Miles will talk about his career in Los Angeles, as artist, educator and critic. On February 1st at 12:00pm, Brad Brown will discuss his ongoing series of ever-changing views. Everyone is welcome to both events – limited seating!
Brad Brown describes his paintings as loaded springs. Keeping true to his conceptual painting and drawing practice, he conceives of his works as ongoing paintings with no end or completion. With 18 years in the making, his interest is the accumulation of material in a continual state of transformation. The ghosts of earlier iterations are visible in the surface accretion of material, whether paint, wood, rope, or fabric. On view will be thirty feet of small format paintings installed in a continuous, or broken grid.
Brown’s history of working on open-ended multi-media projects began in 1987 with The Look Stains, consisting of thousands of works on paper continually recycled, torn, and drawn upon. Brown has produced etchings, lithographs, and artist’s books with Crown Point Press, San Francisco; Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO; and Dieu Donné Studio, Brooklyn, NY.
His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The National Gallery, Washington, DC; and the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others.
Christopher Miles’ sculptures exemplify the best of expressionist ceramics. His objects suggest the architecture of biological systems, with mysterious interstitial passages forming mutable interior and exterior contours. His painterly glazing presents an amalgamate of thick, fleshy colors, dipped, poured, oozing over and through the clay body. With elongated trunks and spreading appendages, the sheer physicality and balance of the forms is striking.
With influences as diverse as Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Ruth Duckworth, Edward Kienholz, John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos, Miles has carved out an ambitious sculptural practice, pushing material limits with a conceptual rigor uniquely his own. Contrary to strict formality, his objects are rife with eloquence, wit, humor and pathos, confounding with the startling appearance of an abstracted tongue protruding from a tunneled passage, or a glazed cascade traversing through a crevasse. “I am interested in notions of objects of desire, curios or objects of curiosity, and objets d’art,” writes Miles in a recent statement, “and how the pleasure in looking, intimacy, and scrutiny associated with such notions might be triggered, heightened, and complicated by an object made by one person to be beheld by others.”
Christopher Miles is an artist, curator, writer, and educator who has been on the faculty of the School of Art at California State University Long Beach since 1998. Since 2016, he has served as head of the CSULB Ceramic Arts Program, and he is a cofounder of the CSULB Center for Contemporary Ceramics.
Earlier in his professional life, Miles focused as a curator and writer of art journalism and criticism. Between 1995 and 2010, he was published in numerous journals, including American Ceramics, Art & Auction, Artforum International, Art in America, Art Lies, Art Nexus, Art Papers, Artext, Artweek, dArt, Flash Art, Flaunt, Frieze, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Tate Etc., Tema Celeste, X-TRA and other publications. He’s contributed catalog and exhibition essays for projects at venues including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Las Vegas Art Museum, the Luckman Art Center at Cal State LA, the Montgomery Gallery at Pomona College (now the Pomona College Museum of Art), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Chris received a 2004 Penny McCall Award for his work as a writer and curator, and received a 2005 award for “Best Thematic Exhibition Nationally” from AICA-USA, the United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, for the Hammer Museum’s survey exhibition THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, which Chris co-curated with James Elaine and Aimee Chang. In 2010, Chris worked with co-curator Kris Kuramitsu to organize the Los Angeles participation in the 2010 ARCOmadrid International Contemporary Art Fair, and the exhibition L.A. Invisible City at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid.
Miles’ work has been exhibited at ACME gallery, L.A. Louver Gallery, Mount Saint Mary’s College, the Torrance Art Museum and the Pasadena Museum of California Art. His work has been reviewed in ARTLURKER, Artillery, Artweek, Art in America, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Notes on Looking, and Sculpture Magazine.