Anna Miller creates machines: machines for navigating memory and experience, machines for storytelling, machines for enforcing and ceding control. Her works are kinetic, dynamic, metronomic; they record the passage of time, index the environment, give gravity and valence to the physical and the haptic as readily as the material and the aesthetic. In fabricating sculptures which enact as well as appear Anna’s practice investigates weight and balance alongside metaphor and wordplay. Her works invite embodied as well as visual contemplation; they ask to be swung, spun, held, and suspended.
In Go Round Anna reduces these physical sensations to an elemental experience of motion. Viewers are invited to literally ride the sculpture, an act which harkens to childhood play while forcing constant awareness of the body’s passage through space. Its skeletal, streamlined form invites interaction while taking on an almost monumental affect, a presence which is at once precarious and uncompromising. Go Round is an armature for shared experiences, one which -- in keeping with Anna’s broader interest in objects which straddle function and metaphor -- also interrogates our relationship to memory and community.
Anna Miller (b. Jacksonville, NC) graduated with her BFA in 2017 from her hometown university, University of Arizona, then moved to the east coast and earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in sculpture in 2020. In addition to her independent practice, Anna has worked in ceramics, drawing, painting, and custom fabrication. She was an associate of the Boathouse Gallery in Tucson and has exhibited in Arizona galleries like the Lionel Rombach Gallery, Steinfeld Warehouse Community Arts Center, and the Tubac Center for the Arts. She was the recipient of the Center of Fine Arts Creative Achievement Award from the University of Arizona in 2017. She currently lives with her partner on a sailboat in New Haven where she works out of a shared studio on her independent practice and collaborations.
