Andrew Miller (3)

Dusk or Dawn by Glasgow-based artist Andrew Miller is the second exhibition at BALTIC 39, a new cultural hub for contemporary art. Miller is part of the celebrated generation of artists to have emerged from Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s. He works across a variety of media including drawing, sculpture, photography and site-specific installation.

Exploring the ambiguous territory between form and function, Miller re-assembles worn and redundant materials, charging them with an unfamiliar presence to prompt questions about use, context and value. The exhibition takes its title from the ambiguities explored in Miller’s work and the in-between states of the materials he uses.

Dusk or Dawn comprises two new works made especially for the exhibition and in response to BALTIC 39 gallery. The first, "You me something else" (2012), is a canopy of bunting that traverses the gallery as a line drawing in space. Throughout the summer our high streets and pubs are laden with bunting to celebrate events from the Queen’s Jubilee, Euro 2012, Wimbledon and the Olympics. Miller re-works these ubiquitous celebratory markers using second-hand and donated clothing to question their possible meanings – yet his is a celebration with nothing apparent to celebrate.

The second work, "Other People’s Time" 2012, takes its title from a body of work first developed in 1992 made of found timber fragments that once existed as some greater, functional whole. In dialogue with You me something else, material history, labour and use value are all suggested. Miller has used electrical tape as a form of drawing for eighteen years and for this work he has used aluminium tape, harnessing its reflective qualities to implicate the viewer as they navigate the gallery and cause the appearance of the work to perpetually shift.