Professor Jill Miller's new video work at Palo Alto Art Center

Art Practice faculty member Jill Miller debuts a new video in the “Holding it Together” exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center.

Jill Miller, My Mother's Titanium Hip," 2020, Video Still Image

In her video work "My Mother's Titanium Hip," Miller creates a frenetic entanglement of video conferencing fragments, 3D models, a chat with a psychic medium, and computer generated imagery to explore the splintering of time and space during pandemic life. She collages the online landscape of our new digital normal — fractured connectedness, anxieties about loss and grief, a dithering between life on- and off-line, and virtually conversing with strangers and friends.

Miller examines her mother’s unexpected death during the pandemic through the lens of “everyday” quarantine living, where life unfolds through digitally mediated experiences. Temporalities shift between the virtual and the real, the past and the present, the dreamy and the distressing. The landscape is unstable and fantastical: error messages interrupt video transmissions, her mother’s titanium hip hovers in the background, and the coronavirus makes an appearance during a conference call.

This video landscape collapses physical, mental, and virtual spaces, and it mirrors the sense of longing and loss felt across the globe: the loss of freedom, togetherness, and time with loved ones.

In addition to the gallery viewing, the complete video is also available online: click here.

For details about the exhibition, click here.