A Young Artist Learns as She Works: Georgie Miller
*This interview appears in CGN's fall 2024 magazine. To subscribe to the print edition click here.*
By GINNY VAN ALYEA
Georgie Miller is definitely from Texas. When I ask her, over lunch one sweltering day when I can feel heat emanating from an expanse of baking Chicago concrete, if she’s been enjoying the summer, she doesn’t mention the 90° temperature, even though it’s all I can think about. Instead she tells me she’s just gotten back from Nicaragua, and she’s off to Montana in a few days. The jet-setting, she explains, is for her job as Travel Editor and Digital Strategy Director for Texas Based PaperCity. But when she’s between trips, she is working on creating her art and experimenting with how to get it in front of a wider audience.
As I melt in my chair Miller keeps her cool, rattling off a list of area galleries she has been following, as well as arts groups and residencies she has been undauntedly applying to. She says she has averaged five residency applications or group show submissions a month for the past year, with five successes so far in 2024: one in Austin, Texas, another in Houston, and three in Chicago. Because Miller lives in both Austin and Chicago, she plans to continue taking advantage building relationships in two gallery markets.
While Miller has been fearlessly sending out applications, she confesses she is learning as she goes.
“I don’t have a real body of work quite yet, so by applying I’m also trying to figure out what sticks as well as what it is I’m working on next,” Miller admits. “Eventually I’d love to work with a dealer who can help me focus and choose a direction, because right now I have several.”
Conventional wisdom has been that navigating the art world is part cold-calling, part self-help. An artist creates a body of work and spends time getting to know various gallery programs in order to decide whether or not there is a fit for their own art. Then an artist must attempt many introductions, steeling themself for individual rejections before going back to fine-tune what they present to galleries or collectors. Artists also have to contend with a limited market of operating galleries that are even accepting unsolicited applications. While much of these truths still hold, in 2024 artists can choose to set up a basic website or even just a social media presence solely to push their precious art out of the nest and in front of millions of content-hungry viewers, at once marketing and selling while also soliciting feedback and gaining visibility, essentially learning to fly in real time. Miller says she has enjoyed going solo so far, prolifically creating work and posting individual pieces as she completes them, as the follower engagement has helped her look at her work the way others might, and she’s also secured a couple commissions along the way.
For now Miller works exclusively in collage, an accessible but often labor intensive medium. She says she chose to work in a photography-based version because it feels like the right vehicle to help her present her exploration of indulgence and consumption in a colorful and appealing way. Her larger-scale tablescapes incorporate light colorways, even glitter, as she creates tableaus of cigarette-filled dinner parties and card games. No iPhones on the tables here, just martinis and matchbooks. Mah-jong has even made an appearance. There’s nothing conspicuously sinister about folded hands of cards and the spilled dregs of a wine bottle, but Miller acknowledges there are various perspectives one might have, depending on which gatherings or social situations come to mind when viewing the work–the laughter-filled ones, the awkward ones, or the ones that should have ended before the tempers flared.
You can tell Miller has reached a point where she is ready to push into new themes and alternative tonalities with her most recent work, which focuses on still lifes of flower arrangements made from snaps of Chicago streets and skyscrapers – 875 N. Michigan, Water Tower Place, a Lakeview apartment building. The palettes are a bit forboding, stormier compared to the lakeside vibes of a relaxing weekend with friends during a house party. Says Miller, “I’m dropping in photos, which is different for me, and these pieces have a darker, more tactile look. I’m trying out styles and seeing if they connect.”
Process is always critical to an artist’s practice, and though Miller is young and juggling art-making along with another full-time job, I can tell she is having fun now, and she will continue to enjoy each layer of the creative process as it comes.
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