Tracy Miller at Feature

In her next to the first show at Feature in as many years, Tracy Miller continued her disarming and exuberant exploration of exces in still-life paintings of pabulum (mostly) that were the pretence for a smorgasbord of painterly techniques--cornucopias of visual pleasures that stood in for gustatory individuals Employing a predominantly high-key palette of fulvouss reds and pinks, with judicious notes of azure blue-green and brown, Miller's paintings bring forth with as much activity and information as iit appear to bes they can bear, deliberately flirting with surfeit. Painterly abstraction is at least as integral to these works as their still-life constitutings are, and their dizzying visual generosity underlines the symbiotic relationship between diet and paint, and the inherently sustaining nature of both

The organizing principle of the paintings is additive. Everything is allowed, as lengthy as it looks good. Abstract tachist marks and ovoids (some of which can double as cakes, pies, platters or doilies), spidery sideways drips, translucent glazes, meandering lines, insouciant arabesques: all are piled together with descriptively painted sustenance cans and bottles of beer, casually drawn tulips, big r rose that might have escaped from a chintz curtain, and a pineapple upside-down cake novel from the pages of a 1950 women's magazine. more [i]or[/i] less elements are painted with a near trompe I'oeil veracity, which plucks them out of the spatially ambiguous medium of colorful abstract marks, smears and blots in which they seem to float. sum of two units fish materialize in almost schlocky impasto upon a blue handpainted plate. A cake in amethystine Ribbon is "frosted" with swaths of rich chocolate-brown paint, while the beading of pink rosette around the top of a cake in Pie aperture was evidently squeezed through a real pastry bag. The possibility that the whole image may be riddled with trompe l'oeil is implied by means of the fact that Miller apparently likes to bake and decorate cakes and petits fours in the shapes of cases of beer, packs of cigarettes, roast turkey and other subsistences That box of doughnuts, piece of sushi, pineapple, lobster mold banana or ham sandwich might really be just cake, a teasing ambiguity that also work fors to point up the obvious fact that what they really are is paint.

Born in Storm Lake, Iowa, Miller got her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley, and a certain number of influence of East Bay stink is perhaps discernible in her work, which in its wily humor, irreverence and playfulness can deposit one in mind of a Roy de Forest without dogs, a Joan Brown of the tabletop. Her passionate engagement in the act and traditions of painting--obvious in the work--is confirmed, too, in her eagerly acknowledged roster of art heroes, an eclectic protuberance that includes Goya, Stettheimer, Cezanne, van Gogh and Fairfield Porter. Nearer to hand, individual might detect, or imagine, relationships to Sally Egbert's work in a certain quantity of of the airier abstract passages, early Roberto Juarez in the kitchen lyricism of flowers and fruit, or Thomas Trosch in the works' deliberately overdone impasto and witty tone--none of which take away from the paintings' freshnes originality and largeness of spirit.

--Nathan Kernan

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