Bio:

Leanne C. Miller was born in Phoenix AZ, and relocated to San Francisco, CA to attend San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 2005. She remained in the Bay Area until 2012, showing work in California and New York and participated in curating shows at various establishments as well as joining the "San Pancho Art Collective", S.P.A.C., which opened the Incline Gallery, SF in 2010, (http://inclinegallerysf.com/info/). Leanne was also commissioned by many organizations to create murals all over San Francisco. She decided to leave her adopted home and return to the desert to work toward an MFA at the University of Arizona, receiving her degree in May 2015. You can see more of her work and stay up to date at www.leannecmiller.tumblr.com, to see murals and community work go to www.leannecmillerartist.blogspot.com. To make Purchases see my Society6 profile link on the home page for prints/reproductions, or contact me here for originals, or giclee' prints at GlobalArtTraders.com. 

Statements per body of work:

2016: In an attempt to abridge a "statement", I will simply share with you that I am interested in textures and patterns, many found in nature. The natural world is a refuge for me, every time I venture out into nature, I come back feeling more whole, less crazy and frazzled by everyday life. My head is cleared. As my work becomes more minimal, focusing on the colors I have seen and the textures I encountered. The bark of a tree, the shape of a cactus, the way sturdy desert grasses blow in the wind. Those places seems rare and under protected, as if they will disappear at any moment, fragile. I have a desire for their conservation.

The rest of this page are older statements from bodies of work made mostly before 2016. 

"Inlay Constructions 2015" are an abstracted research of geological and other natural forms. These works are a spin off of the "Sedimentary Layers" sections in the "Time Shifts Fleeting Remains" series from 2014/2015. Here I have taken only the abstracted areas, and focused on those parts. I cut apart thickly painted brush marks, and put them together as I would if I were inlaying wood much like a puzzle piece, and using the "dovetail" technique, which is used in woodworking as a strengthening and jointing tactic. This work takes the ideas I had in the "Sedimentary Layers" research, about the layers in the earth and its geologies, building up over time through trauma such as volcanoes and oceans and floods coming and going. This is much like my life experiences. They build moment after moment, making me who I am, a personal history which influences what I have become. Furthermore, I am greatly influenced by my father who is a carpenter, a fine wood worker. I grew up around well crafted technique, perfection, and the smell of wood. When I make these, I am tapping into the memories from long ago, and use the same techniques, but with nothing more than paper, paint, and an x-acto knife. These constructions are finished pieces as they are, but are also in a sense prototypes for work to come, as I intend to build similar items out of actual wood.

Sedimentary Experience 2014/ Sediments, Disbursals and Resonance: Time Shifts/Fleeting Remains 2015:

My work depicts Arizona and notions of a prodigal daughter’s homecoming. I am a native of the Sonoran Desert, but was gone for many years, living coastally. I have returned to this dry yet diverse environment, to see a familiar landscape in a new way. I interpret the layers of the earth’s sediments in the desert’ mountains as a metaphor for my multi-layered life experience. Raised in a religious home, I see magic in everyday life. As a skeptically minded adult, I seek logic and scientific ways of understanding the world. I see wonder in nature, and yet feel grounded in the landscape. My analysis of these geologies is as much an interpretation of that magic and consciousness-altering moments of being outdoors, as it is an expression of my interest in science.

Bright bold colors reflect dramatic skies. Geometric shapes act as windows emphasizing layers of geologic matter limning the earth’s tectonic plates and revealing the sediments underlying strata. Small repetitive marks made with paint pens, markers, and spray painted stencils reflect the elementary quantum particles and the possibility that intentions and consciousness are material. This energy flows through the terrain, up into the sky along a trajectory that suggests a journey has taken place there.

My work is inspired by my interest in the gray area where science and philosophy collide. In this space subatomic particles and energy, flow through the environments and their geologies that shape each other. The two forces, energy and matter, manipulate each other’s direction and growth. The earth continually changes, the planet’s crust moving from immense pressure at fault lines, which create great mountain ranges. Likewise, I have become who I am as a result of external forces. I depict geologic matter in abstracted and at times chaotic scenes as surrogates for the many layers of experience, which make up my personal history. 

Quantum Consciousness Drawings, 2013: 

The imagery in this series comes from antiquated photographs from the 1800’s of “séances” performed by the Spiritualists movement. This movement formed in upstate New York in the 1860’s. The Spiritualists movement formed during a time right after the Civil War, when droves of people were dying from the national uprising. As peoples loved ones, fathers, husbands, brothers, and many civilians died, people looked for a direct way to reconnect with those lost loved ones through séance and prayer. In many quantum physicists opinions at the time, a connection could be made with the other side through a further inspection of science and spirituality. The belief that one can be proved by the other. In this series I was addressing my interest in the grey area between science and philosophy.

Installation 2014

This installation was installed originally at the Steinfeld Warehouse in Tucson AZ, May 2015 as a part of a group installation show. The second location was a smaller installation at the University of Arizona "Graduate Gallery".

The installation consists of sewed tubes, representing neurons and their pathways. I was interested in this subject matter through my research in consciousness. I am particularly interested in Stuart Hammeroff’s studies as an anesthesiologist professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and his involvement with quantum physics Professor Sir Rodger Penrose, author or the Emperors New Mind, and Professor at Cambridge University and Oxford, among many researchers in Mathematical physics and other academic pursuits. The two Academics have raised the complicated question of, "What is consciousness, where does it come from, and can quantum physics explain it?".

In contemplating this question, I began my own meditative pursuit by sewing dozens of yards of sinuous material to create my own version of what they call “microtubules”, one of the possible components that give rise to what we know as consciousness. In conjunction with this process, I was printmaking, another repetitive, meditative type of making. I was creating shapes and colors that evoked for me; movement, transformation, experience and the idea of synapse. Lastly I inserted LED lights into ping pong balls to represent the electricity that flows through our brains and bodies to help us create our experience, our consciousness.