SHALA MILLER [NOMINATED BY MOYRA DAVEY]

There is a new bird in my backyard that only sings every other hour during the day. It sings three notes which I figured out on the piano. I took a recording of the bird singing and sent it to a friend to see if he could identify the song. He couldn’t and so he asked another friend. White Throated Sparrow.








The flower in my hair was given to me during a third date. She and I were walking to get ice cream. Spring is my favorite poem.


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Shala Miller works across photography, film, writing, music, and performance as a means of meditating on the conjunction of desire, mourning, pain, and pleasure. Under the moniker Freddie June, they explore voice as material. Miller’s new body of work, Genesis, is an extension of their yearslong practice of building fictional worlds with an auto-ethnographic root. For Artists Space, Miller has created an immersive installation that positions a three-channel video as a soundtrack for a fictional character, Obsidian, who serves as a kind of alter ego for the artist, created at the beginning of this year as a way to process their experience of rage as a Black femme. A chorus in three parts, both in terms of sound and image, the work tells the story of Obsidian’s becoming. During the exhibition, Miller will invite a series of skilled vocalists and musicians to perform as an integral part of their presentation.

www.smille.co