This project explores disturbance regimes and possible methodologies for disrupting systems of control. It questions how meaning is created through the contextualization of images, and investigates how their contents and associated impacts can be visible and absent at the same time.
The boar’s practice of rooting and wallowing mirrors Miner’s interest in shifting and disturbing patterns and systems, as the artist seeks a visual language through which to articulate the responsibility of engaging with images. Through an arrangement, Miner explores the impact of conceptual and physical displacement, such as patterns of migration—both willing and unwilling. In addition to troubling images, the exhibition includes sculpture, film/video, architectural intervention, and textile work to create a space of refuge in the context of migration. Moving through pathways created in the gallery space, viewers are invited to rest and wallow.
Solo exhibition at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemprary Photography, Tkaronto.
April 11 - May 27, 2023.
Publication & Project Text by Laura Demers - PDF
Exhibition Text by Lilian O’Brien Davis - PDF
Interview with Weiyi Chang & Colin Miner - Podcast
Exhibition Walkthrough - Video
Exhibition Digital Project - Website
Review/Experimental Text by Jonathan Scott - Web Text
Installation views. Fabric print, neon, cast bronze, silver gelatin prints, HD video, ceramic figure, brooms, architectural interventions.
Look at that feral pig rooting for pixels. What do they want? A few apples or acorns, the odd image, and many histories become unearthed and exposed to light. Like concepts waiting to be tossed up and overturned, as if doing so will give passage from mind to material. At times, their labour is anxious and peppered with long periods between forest and garden. Exactly what they are looking for is a question. We can only see that they are in the act of doing something. It is hard to know what lies under the surface even slightly and especially deeply, in that cool and dark dampness. But we can hold onto the certainty of moving—to the practice of poking, prying, searching, and roaming about—as an adaptable way of being that offers scattered remnants of presence and positions. Wallowing in the mud, we find things assembled in places they never belonged.
Solo exhibition & residency at La Datcha (Berlin, 2019) with digital artist publication (english + german translation). PDF
Installation views. Zink prints, tarp print, reactive dye print on fabric, raku pottery smoke tray, clay casts, garden wire, incense, grommets and eber pils.
Works that collectively act as a proposition to consider the futurity of the photographic image. Exhibition curated by Kimberly Phillips at The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2018). In reference to my doctoral dissertation A Photographic Ontology: Being Haunted within the Blue Hour and Expanding Field. PDF
The fugitive and cyclical are ongoing starting points for Colin Miner, whose work traces the ontological anxiety that, in his words, “shadows” the photographic. Considering qualities of lightness, darkness, reflection and refraction, Miner seeks to evoke rather than capture photography’s qualities of relation. In The Blue Hour, a constellation of disparate objects and images are brought together to create converging lines of inquiry, which elliptically surface and resurface. Here, Miner approaches the photograph as a state of suspension; a manifestation of “space-crossed time.” Plaster and latex casts of dust covers for photographic equipment (collected by the artist for potential future use) are tinted by different hues of red light thrown by two neon sculptures whose spiral forms recall early 20th century Czech physician Jan Purkinje’s empirical studies of afterimages in the eye. A large-scale print portrays the slippage of silver emulsion across the surface of a photographic plate – quite literally, an image of photography’s unfixed state. This movement of glittering emulsion is echoed once again in the diminutive but mesmerizing video Untitled (snail) (2017), which follows, in an endless loop, the barely perceptible movement of a large Peruvian snail – an animal which, one might argue, both secretes time and carries it upon its back. As writer Jacqueline Mabey remarks about Miner’s work, in a statement that might also be applied to the conditions of photography as a whole, “you can try to fix the image, but it will never stick. The temporality of the photograph is not the ‘there-then’ but contains the kernel of potential futures, held in eternal ‘yet-could-be.’”
Installation views. 4K video, C-print, inkjet prints, Zink prints, iPad mini & soft cover, polymerized gypsum casts, neon, cast bronze, cast silver, stones, isolant foam, Dibond, wood, matboard, silicone ear plugs, paint, dye, and tape.
A while ago that still feels recent, I learned to walk with a cat. We followed many paths, like methodologies, which often offered long waits for things that would not appear.
Alongside, my eyes began looking for birds, an occupation that came naturally. Colour, form, movement, and specific qualities of relations proposed comparisons to be translated through depictions in books.
Familiar with looking for details in contrast to positions of movement, my eyes became disciplined on stillness.
Having trained them to see birds, my eyes turned curious for cats. And so, walking with one cat lead to a lot of walking looking for cats. Previously there appeared not to be many cats
and now, many many cats.
The works in this exhibition draw from lithography plate images and moiré patterns to create conversations with cats that have crossed my path while going for walks — catwalks. Exhibition at Open Studios (Toronto, 2018) developed through the Visiting Artist Residency, and with technical + production assistance from Pudy Tong.
Installation views. Variable photo-litho plates, inkjet prints, cast bronze, feathers, wood, pipe cleaners, tape, and tack-it.
Bringing together disparate works and converging lines of inquiry, Two Toed Lassitude comes together as a composition, an ever-changing assemblage, growing and evolving through associations, assonances and absence. Much like the ways tiny polyps form coral or trees become a forest, the works shift and expand through proximity to one another, building density of meaning where the political becomes visible through the absent, cyclical and askew. This is the way Miner works, cropping out part of an older work and reconfiguring it in a new context, returning to an idea from a different point of view, inverting scale and colour, making movement imperceptibly slow, transforming objects that were once slack to be rigid and allowing stiffness to slump. The works become scaffolding to expansive ideas that layer materials and metaphors as a way to point to something overlooked or forgotten. Created over a series of residencies – Banff, Peru and the Bruce Peninsula – the works weave an unfolding understanding of the natural world with one that is temporarily arrested through imagery, allowing for slowed and lassitudinous way of looking.
Solo exhibition at 8eleven (Toronto, 2017) with essay “Your Own Eye” by Leila Timmins. PDF
Installation views. HD video, neons, reactive dye print on fabric, polymerized gypsum casts, C-print, inkjet prints, Zink prints, iPad mini, cast silver, cast bronze, stones, Dibond, isolant foam, matboard, paint, dye, and tape.
