FUTURE PERFECT Exhibition

Jill Miller, "Enjoy Yourself," Digital Painting, 20 ft wide x 11 ft high

Professor Jill Miller's solo exhibition FUTURE PERFECT opens at FAB Gallery at the University of Alberta in Canada on January 17th and runs through February 10, 2023. She presents a public lecture at 5pm on January 17th prior to the opening reception.

In the exhibition FUTURE PERFECT, Professor Miller uses artificial intelligence (AI) software and digital technologies to imagine alternate realities and visualize fantasies. Her projects are bound together by humor: an AI exacts revenge on a musician who put Miller’s unauthorized photograph on his album cover; the artist infiltrates a popular video game platform marketed toward adolescents to expose unusual behavior; a retro-futuristic installation collapses time and space by merging a 1970s space colony landscape with contemporary video game furniture; and a large, inflatable sculpture uses the materials and technology of children’s birthday-party bouncy houses to manifest anxiety. Playful up front, Miller’s work reveals fissures in the facade of our postpandemic, anthropocenic world, referencing vanishing ecosystems, enduring gender inequality, and declining mental health. The four works featured oscillate between naivete and skepticism, and embody the “sad clown” paradox that humor is a veneer thinly veiling sorrow.