Christopher Miles

REVIEW: David Roth, Squarecylinder.com – “In the largest of the six works on view, which measures about 36 inches tall, the visible “topography” resembles an exploded view of the human heart, filled with congealed pools of pigment.  The most striking hang like stalactites from the “ventricles.”  Few sculptures conjure so many primordial associations.”

JULIA COUZENS BLOG POST: 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.

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.