QUENTON MILLER: HERE I AM, WRITING YOU A LETTER

Here I am, writing you a letter. Thank you for the flowers. The whole room is saturated with their fragrance; I hated so to leave them that I didn’t go to bed. In this absurd room with its columns, its weapons and its stuffed owl, I feel at home. The warmth, the smell, the peace and quiet belong to me. I take them with me like a reflection in the mirror: When I leave, they leave. When I return, I look—and there they are. I can hardly believe that they live in the mirror only through me. Now I wish most of all that it were summer, that everything that has happened had not happened. That I were young and strong. Then, perhaps, of this cross between crocodile and child would remain only the child and I might be happy. (VS)

On the roof of the museum are large steel pictograms developed through slow psychic incubation—daily drawing has supplanted most my daily writing practice—as well as re-processed representations of the Hotel de Coninck’s surroundings transformed into little typographic pieces. They are displayed using the roof of the museum and surrounding buildings as a higgledy baseline—literally shouted from the rooftops. The drawings are intensely personal, an embarrassingly private language for the eponymous and displaced addressee out there in the good life, a humble and reliable depository for these words, who may remain less effected than the immediate neighbours and their constant complaints. The letters move any possible narrative sideways rather than forward, towards concerns for the personal safety of the narrator, yet their scale and to-the-point graphic language is bound within the complicit language of communication agencies and the bits that can articulate in a given imaginary space, trumpeting the coming of baristas and barristers more than it’s original lyrical intent. Or not.

Quenton Miller is an Australian ex- writer of meta- fiction who turned his attention to navigating journalistic, political and media worlds with literary ones—using a range of films, drawings, text, architectures and books to play with format, speaker position, the displacement of being down under, grating these structural concerns against soiled literary mainstays like the tracing of consciousness and lyricism. The results are often open ended mousetraps which aim to catch a glimpse of the knots these drives work themselves into within the attention economy and global power. Recent exhibitions include Centrale Fies, Trentino, SMBA, Amsterdam, Apex Art, New York, 1646, the Hague, West Space, Melbourne, and his work often spirals into journalism, publicity stunts or newspaper cartoons which have ended up as or about his work in Guernica Magazine, the Atlantic, the Believer, Indiewire and various formats online.