It’s About Time.

A collection of cinemagraphs and film ‘The 365 Seconds’
Artist: Adrian J. Miller
Curated by Dima Matar

Supercrawl – September 11th -12th

“What follows is a personal exercise in actuality” is the first line that opens Adrian J. Miller’s work: The 365 Seconds of My 2015 – a document that strings together sound, images, and video of the artist’s year in a hyper-controlled format, in which viewers are invited to revisit memories they never had. Unlike the desperation that typically accompanies a young artist’s first attempt at self-portraiture, Miller’s exhibited work is very deliberate in its foray into the genre. In the cinemagraphs, Miller appears to document increasingly mundane aspects of his day-to-day (getting his hair cut, fixing his car, shopping) but instilling within them a performative whimsy that is an inevitable symptom of turning the lens inward. With that, we are left with a dichotomous body of work, one that is self-reflexive – literally and, as a result, campy. The other quiet, eerie, and disciplined.

“(in)human behaviour” isolates movements and replays them in such a way that they become foreign and robotic. Miller’s cinemagraphs obsessively replay moments in time until they simultaneously lose all meaning and gain profundity one would never prescribe them had they not been forced to linger.

“Scenes from a movie that was never made” beg the question: how is this self-portraiture? The answer is: all art is. Art, as a vehicle of self-expression, is always autobiographical and always reflective of its creator. We view Miller’s subjects not as he does, but through him.

Artist Statement:
Our identities are shaped around the stories we tell about ourselves. Who we are today depends on where we were yesterday. With the passage of time, our narrative about who was there and what we’ve done blends and some details become lost. Our memories become our story.

My vice is to visually document this aspect of identity. By blending photography and video together, I hope to capture fleeting fragments of time. Every day I chronicle a moment in my life. It’s about time I share some of them with you.

Adrian J. Miller is a new media storyteller from Hamilton, Ontario. He is a founding member of Humble Roots Media and pursues passionately the creation of engaging visuals.
Adrian has experience working for some of Canada’s biggest artists and documentarians. He is a graduate of Journalism and Television Broadcasting from both Sheridan and Mohawk College.

Curator Dima Matar
Dima Matar is an emerging Media Artist and Curator with a passion for visual media, ranging from film to experimental video, as well as live-coded generative visuals, an art from she was exposed to as a member of the Cybernetic Orchestra, an experiential live-coding ensemble. Matar holds a B.A. in Multimedia from McMaster University, which served as a basis for her work in arts education with at-risk youth. Matar’s work has been exhibited at the Factory Media Centre, Hamilton Audio-Visual Node (HAVN), and the central branch of the Hamilton Public Library, as well as the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Pavilion at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.