Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to present Greenhouse, a solo exhibition of recent photographs and sculptures by Mayumi Terada.
Terada’s work has long been rooted in the process of fabricating miniature sculptures and photographing them. Her sculptural models of interior spaces comprise wood, Styrofoam, plaster, and fabric, which translate in photographs as representing the absence of a person who might have just left the space, and the ensuing, inevitable loneliness that exists between the real and imagined.
Greenhouse follows this same production process, extending themes of absence even further with slight shadow figures lingering in the photographic series view from a bed x a view from bed side. Terada has chosen to depict scenery from low viewpoints in this series, eliciting the feeling of looking up from isolation, perhaps contemplating an eventual passing. Mixing black and white images with pale green monochrome hues reminds viewers of a dreamy, clouded state, as if slipping between both sides. The works imply both the solitude caused by someone’s recent absence, as well as the inevitable absence of oneself from this world.
Accompanying this photographic series is Terada’s entire series of 10 miniature sculptures, six foot platform. “Six feet” is representational of the human body, suggesting a person might be lying on these platforms, though the actual size of the platforms is that of a miniature scale. Terada intends the platforms to be a place for the soul of a loved one to rest, elaborating on her work’s central themes of memory and the absence of the lost past.
Through her photographs, Japanese artist Mayumi Terada reveals seemingly familiar and intimate domestic scenes devoid, though suggestive, of human presence—a soup plate sitting on a table, a shower stall, bare closets with empty hangers. Trained as a sculptor, Terada first builds diminutive domestic sets, and photographs them to achieve these austere environments. Terada was born in Tokyo and received her MFA from the University of Tsukuba. In 2001 she moved to New York, where she currently works and resides.
Greenhouse runs concurrently with two other exhibitions: Ladder to Heaven, an installation by Yayoi Kusama, and Shards_Subduction, a solo exhibition by Virginia Inés Vergara, curated by Anastasiya Siro.
Installed in a darkened gallery are Yayoi Kusama’s Ladder to Heaven and Souls burst in the air – B. Both works elaborate on themes of mirroring, infinity, reflection, and repetition, which have all been central to the artist’s work since the 1960s. Ladder to Heaven comprises a steel ladder entwined with fiber optic cable and two large circular mirrors—one above and below the ladder. The effect is that of a glowing endless path with which the viewer is encountering only one small section. Souls burst in the air is dynamic composition of nine floating spheres of varying sizes connected by a twisting, undulating course of white steel tubing that challenges the viewer’s sense of space in a manner similar to Kusama’s other installations, but experienced here in the round.
Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to present Shards_Subduction, a solo exhibition of new works by Virginia Inés Vergara, curated by Anastasiya Siro.
Shards_Subduction features a selection of photographs from the artist’s project of the same name. The first part of the title refers to Vergara’s process of hunting through old art books for photographs of marble and wood sculptures; tearing the photographs into pieces, isolating areas of deeply carved, often tumultuous drapery; assembling these shards into compositions; and re-assembling and rephotographing the pieces in endless variations, transforming texture and scale in the process. The term “subduction” is borrowed from geology, referring to the movements of the edge of one tectonic plate under another, the first sinking into the earth’s mantle as the plates converge. Vergara regards the interplay of the shards’ edges and the powerful implied movement in the draperies as analogous to these subterranean mechanics. The result is abstraction, imbued with the artist’s personal meanings deriving from the represented sculptures themselves, the romance of old photographic illustration, and the ever-present urge to compose.
The arrangement of select works in grid formation serves to heighten the separation of the abstract shards from their bodily origin. The ways that forms variously flow into, support, or abruptly abut within each photograph applies as well to the interaction of multiple photographs within this framework. The grid enhances Vergara’s emphasis on the tensions among flatness, volume, and depth that we see in this body of work. Complicating and reframing what were once historically familiar artworks, her subversive displacement of abstracted forms liberates the works from their origins and extracts entirely new terrains from sculptural bodies.
Virginia Inés Vergara was born and raised in New York. After receiving her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in photography from Hunter College, she has maintained a studio practice in Harlem. Her work is included in numerous private European and American collections. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Madrugadas curated by Tim Goossens, Model Theories at fordPROJECT curated by Philip Ording, New York, Dialogues at Tambaran Gallery, NYC.
Shards_Subduction runs concurrently with two other exhibitions: Ladder to Heaven, an installation by Yayoi Kusama, and Greenhouse, a solo exhibition by Mayumi Terada.

Opening : November 19, 6-8 pm

mpefm USA art press release