Yes, I made that word up, “exponentialized.” Surely, a little latitude is allowed on your own blog!

But what I am referring to are acrylic mixed media works by artist Grant Miller (who hails from Kansas City) at a show a few weeks ago courtesy of the Cecille R. Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St. Louis.

http://www.webster.edu/news/releases/images/grantmiller1.jpg

http://www.webster.edu/news/releases/images/grantmiller2.jpg

http://www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com/press/miller.pdf;

http://oneartworld.com/artists/G/Grant+Miller.html

Miller constructs elaborate and exceedingly intricate three dimensional spaces from linear elements – interconnected lines, shapes, frames, and rope.  If you took all the shells of buildings (down to the girders and wiring) from a city skyline and jumbled them all together, you might get an inkling of what results in Miller’s work. They reminded me of labyrinths which themselves are interconnected and woven together. Three-dimensionalized. Exponentialized. Strangely enough, though, the resulting structure is anything but chaotic but rather seems to my eye to have an inherent structural stability, as in you couldn’t destroy it with wrecking ball if you tried.

As a music analogy, you might think Wagnerian, dense, robust, relentless, but every note connected to every other note and word (in the operas anyway) in some way.

The narrative description provided at the gallery (which, frankly, almost never make a lick of sense to me), say they are about overexposure (such as to cyberspace -hey, that’s where we are now!) and information overload. Perhaps, but here is what Miller’s work did to me: I felt like I was the center of these elaborate structures and that caused me to think about my relationship with the vastness (structural complexity?) of my interconnected world and even in specific ways, such has how I “connect” with people through this blog.

Then I realized something. This blog may be part of that vast astral cloud known as cyberspace but I’ve been connecting with a few people on a one-to-one basis through it. So, what results from this blog is perhaps the antithesis of Miller’s representations. A few solid human connections distilled from the miasma of information overload.

I found interesting to think about. I am anything but exponentialized at this moment.

Anyway, Grant Miller’s work is worth a closer look. I can’t recall anything quite like it.