Now Open: Witch, Cub and Dream Hunter

10 November 2020 – 22 February 2021

Unit London is thrilled to announce Emily Marie Miller’s group exhibition, Witch, Cub and Dream Hunter, beginning on Tuesday November 10^th at Brownie Project in Shanghai. The show is a collaborative project with Unit London and will also feature the works of artists Yves Sherer and Charlie Goering. The three artists’ work can be appreciated as separate fantastical narratives but will come together to imbue the gallery space with an overarching sense of mystery and wonder.

The group exhibition presents three tales of the Witch, the Cub and the Dream Hunter. Each entity has their own distinct story but all act as guardian spirits of a mystical valley. The witch only comes out at night, the immortal Cub roams the forest all day long and the Dream Hunter, uninterested in the human world, lurks in the swamps to steal the dreams of lost travellers.

The exhibition presents a selection from Emily Marie Miller’s striking body of work, which revolves around an acute awareness of the corporeal. She describes her abundantly fluid compositions as spiritual dances with the unconscious. Miller’s brushstroke is at once delicate and explicit, conveying both suppleness and dynamism. Using her own body as a visual starting point, Miller’s figures are able to role play by stepping into various archetypes. These figures may initially be conceived through self-portraiture, but Miller abstracts her own form, distorting it to a point of extreme generalisation. The figures are often faceless; viewers are then able to project their own experience or vision onto these featureless beings. Through this process of generalisation, Miller’s female figures are able to inhabit prototypical forms, visually conveying an intense ‘archetypal power’ and evoking a psychological feeling through body posture alone. Miller therefore delves into the significance of the ‘female gaze’. In her works, the woman is both muse and producer.

Competition in a Confined Space, 2018, oil on canvas, 101.5 x 76 cm

In Miller’s paintings, various forms undulate in different contorted positions, revolving together in a seemingly Dionysian ritual. Through multiple self-projections, ghostly and mysterious bodies build up an almost matriarchal tribe, which seems to conjure a certain spiritual power. Miller has stated that her Catholic upbringing and her fascination with Astrology have jointly influenced her thought process. These two apparently conflicting inspirations come together in her work to evoke a seductive, yet, mystical sense of spiritualism.

Emily Marie Miller (b. 1991 St. Petersburg, Florida) received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Florida in 2013 before moving to New York City as a painter in 2015. Miller has exhibited solo shows with Barney Savage Gallery in New York and with Unit London. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, and New York City, notably Kasmin Gallery’s 2018 exhibition, Seed, curated by Yvonne Force. Miller currently attends The Macedonia Institute residency program in Chatham, New York. As well as her forthcoming group show at Brownie Project, she will be featured in a two-person show with New York’s Monya Rowe Gallery in 2021.