Paul Miller

I was born in 1985 and raised in Columbus, Indiana. I spent the majority of my childhood and adolescence living in a multicultural household, speaking a mixture of English and Spanish – my father is of German descent and my mother is a native of Venezuela.

Even from an early age, I exhibited creative and inquisitive inclinations that have carried on my entire life. I remember spending countless hours constructing cars, cities, and space vessels out of Lego blocks, while in a later childhood phase – I explored the world of craft electronics and amateur radio.

My love for art and science has always been a push-pull sequence. Some of my most recent work exhibits the notion that art and science can coexist. KH37L92, an interactive video installation, explores issues of covert surveillance, machine automation, and systematic/coded classification. Deficiency, a two channel video, explores gender issues – specifically those raised by male body image and the media’s perpetuation of idealism – and the extents to which someone might attempt to push/harm themselves to reach this level of “perfection” by introducing excessive amounts of synthetic chemicals into their bodies.

My interest in people and their cultural backgrounds, as well as the symbolism found in and enabled via personal/intimate objects, can be seen in some of my earlier photographic work. Favorites was one of the first conceptual black and white projects I ever made. For each portrait, I asked the subject to bring their favorite personal object and stand in front of the American flag. The intent of the piece was that perhaps the objects themselves could communicate something more to the viewer about the person in the portrait than an expression alone could ever generate. In this case, the objects begin to create a narrative – a narrative that is different for everyone who comes across them. Her Childhood Dreams was one of my first color photography projects. It was also an extension of this initial idea – that objects carry meaning and they can convey very intriguing stories.

I will be spending three weeks in Germany this coming year, just after graduation. My goal is to continue expanding upon these initial exploratory bodies of work. I am interested in German culture and history and how this relates to me personally – as I am half German – and how foreign objects may carry meaning back overseas.