NEW12 Artist Interview, ACCA 2012

Miller works across sculpture, installation, video and performance. His practice reflects on the relationship between humans and animals as an allegory of human society and culture. A continuing interest of his work is the incorporation of live animals into his artistic process and, in some cases, the finished work.

For NEW12 Miller has recreated the Berlin Zoo’s Modernist-style monkey enclosures. Of the two rooms he has constructed, the centre space is the most elaborate, with complex mosaic tiles, trees, chains and sculptures. The others have a fake nature, creating a pseudo organic environment. Bennett’s remaking and resituating of these enclosures asks us to ponder why we make homes for animals with human qualities. These purpose-less, purpose built enclosures, devoid of inhabitants be- come haunted, still places and spaces. They become relics of quasi-domestications and examples of machine for living modernism now discredited. Ultimately Miller rescues these structures back to sculpture and aesthetics.

NEW12
17 March – 20 May 2012