GMA ARCHITECTS TO PRESENT PULLING THREADS

On view October 28th, 2023 through February 1, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 28th, 5-9 pm. 

GMA Architects is pleased to announce Pulling Threads an exhibition by Abbie Miller, featuring a large-scale textile installation in their Portland office. The exhibition results from a ten-month residency with the firm, during which Miller learned technical machine smocking using a twelve-inch Read Pleater. The new body of work explores paradox and sculptural form by challenging and revisiting historical construction methods within the garment industry, in line with Miller's twenty-year practice.   The artist uses over-the-top construction processes and bold colors to create a textile that embodies visceral design. 

The textile, which is made of muslin and thread, features undulating waves and red stripes that shift in and out of legibility. The stripes fade to pink as they are manipulated into more compact spaces and joined by a vibrant yellow sinew. Threads hang in place as stops and starts to the stitches, amplifying an intense construction and deconstruction process. Miller explores new formal techniques by merging interpretations of the classic garment stripe, exploring how it can transform in scale and movement, through the articulation of a smocking machine. The active movement of the pattern depicted in the compositions is inspired by 19th-century day dress's detail and form, smock tops, and the beginnings of American sportswear. 

The artist has combined innumerable rows of stitching and tightly packed patterns with open-flowing movement, creating a riot of discordant and laborious corrugation. The piece was improvised on-site and developed in response to the environment, with bright colors introduced by hand painting and screen printing the muslin before passing it through the pleater. The textile measures twelve feet tall and nearly reaches floor to ceiling in the center of the room. The relationship between the construction, form, and surrounding space is tight, achieving a new intimacy and intensity. This dense piece commands the viewer to look closely at the details and experience the work in its totality. The exhibition aims to create new identities beyond former social constraints, with smocking liberated from the linear to the sublime. Ms. Miller's nascent sartorial vocabulary has resulted in a construction that floats incomprehensible in space, suspended by the threads that form it.

The title "Pulling Threads" refers to delving deeper into history and the self. This exhibition explores the craft of smocking, which has historically served as laborers' attire and a decorative couture process. The show's title also relates to pulling smocking threads to compress and expand this object within the GMA workspace. ‘I am examining how a process can materialize into a visual form that can compress and suspend historical and contemporary expressions tailored to a particular location. What falls apart or becomes disillusioned, and what becomes clearer through the investigation process?’

Abbie Miller is an artist and designer who works between the fields of fashion and sculpture. She is based in Portland, OR, and was included in the 2020 China and USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art exhibit. Her works have been exhibited at the Academy of Arts and Letters, Portland Art Museum, The Missoula Museum of Art,  Nicolaysen Art Museum, and Cranbrook Academy of Art, among others, and her works are in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum and the Scottsdale Museum of Art. She is a faculty member at the Applied Craft and Design MFA program through Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Abbie Miller is a talented, up-and-coming artist creating exciting sculptural installations with distinctive materials and an original vision. Originally from Billings, Miller received her BFA from the University of Wyoming with a minor in apparel construction, holds a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Maryland Institute College of Art, 2005, and earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2007. After graduate school Miller moved back west to Jackson Hole, WY and worked as a fiber instructor and tailor while pursuing a career as a fashion designer. She integrated into Jackson Hole’s small but vital contemporary art scene, exhibiting her sculpture in group and solo exhibitions.

MAM will feature Miller’s talent and creative process in the form of a site-specific installation entitled Abbie Miller: Exit Strategies. Ever since MAM re-opened as an expanded museum in 2006 the exhibition staff has sought out artists working in installation and large-scale sculpture to create original works for the new beautiful spaces. The Aresty Gallery on MAM’s main floor, featuring a long, open site line across its split level, has consistently been the space to attract the attention of artists. After a recent visit to MAM, Miller enthusiastically accepted the challenge to create a new work that will draw inspiration from and interact with the large, multi-level space.

“For the Missoula Art Museum the galleries’ use of movement both in structure and metaphor fascinated me. The gallery, with two sets of stairs running at longitude and latitude through the space, has an architecture that felt like a type of precipice of sorts, a division between spaces that one has to integrate into, step up and onto. This became a really exciting opportunity to connect two separate spaces with one sculpture, one line,” states Miller.

Miller’s aesthetic is unique and honest, drawing equally from her art education and passion for fashion design. The artworks are an innovative amalgam of fiber, fashion design, and contemporary largescale sculpture. The sculptural forms are architectural in scale and express figurative movement.

Further advancing the perception of a living figure in the forms is the vinyl covering that is the surface of the work. Evoking clothing or skin, the vinyl wrinkles and stretches, it sags or gathers, and it also holds the work together. Vinyl is shiny and slick; the smooth surface is expressive and seductive, and nostalgic of a certain sex appeal. The structure of the sculpture is constructed with lumber and then skinned by wrapping the armature with vinyl that is held together by a continuous zipper.

She builds the form and sews the “skins” simultaneously; it is an intuitive process that Miller says is akin to drawing for her. The final piece is never fully realized until the last zipper tooth is zipped into place. For Miller, the zipper is a decisive element in work both metaphorically and as a crucial physical structure. She states, “it facilitates order in my sculptures in a structural, engineered way being that it is a single line that fuses stitched marks and vinyl into a whole, unified object. A zipper creates identity. So it is a threshold of sorts.”

The Portland Art Museum is pleased to present the 2013 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, celebrating the artists and creative community in the five-state greater Northwest region. This year’s six exceptional artists showcase the wide-ranging, disparate practices in the region: Anne Appleby (Montana), Karl Burkheimer (Oregon), Isaac Layman (Washington), Abbie Miller (Wyoming), Nicholas Nyland (Washington), and Trimpin (Washington). In addition to having their work featured in the Museum’s special exhibition galleries, accompanying catalogue, and related programming, one recipient will be further recognized with the $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer Prize.

Regional arts professionals were invited to nominate up to three artists on the basis of quality, innovation, relevance to community or global issues, continuity of vision, and dedication to studio practice for award consideration. After reviewing 176 submissions, 28 finalists were selected by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art, and guest advisor, Apsara DiQuinzio, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum. Ms. Laing-Malcolmson conducted studio visits with the finalists to determine this year’s six award winners.

The Contemporary Northwest Art Awards exhibition program was created to highlight and support established and emerging artists from the five-state region of Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. Now in its third year, CNAA reflects the Museum’s dedication to engage and promote the Northwest’s visual arts community.

Organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art. Supported by the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Fund for Northwest Art, The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust, Mary Chomenko Hinckley and Greg Hinckley, Jim and Susan Winkler, Richard and Deanne Rubinstein, Laura S. and Roger S. Meier Flower Fund of OCF, Bonnie Serkin and Will Emery, and Dave Holt/Dalla Terra.

With generous contributions from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, including support from the City of Portland and Multnomah County, and Work for Art, including contributions from more than 60 companies and 1,600 employees in the region.