Curatorial Statement by Natalie Loveless, January 2023
In the exhibition FUTURE PERFECT, artist Jill Miller uses artificial intelligence (AI) software and digital technologies to imagine alternate realities and visualize fantasies. Her projects are bound together by humor: an AI exacts revenge on a musician who put Miller’s unauthorized photograph on his album cover; the artist infiltrates a popular video game platform marketed toward adolescents to expose unusual behavior; a retro-futuristic installation collapses time and space by merging a 1970s space colony landscape with contemporary video game furniture; and a large, inflatable sculpture uses the materials and technology of children’s birthday-party bouncy houses to manifest anxiety. Playful up front, Miller’s work reveals fissures in the facade of our postpandemic, anthropocenic world, referencing vanishing ecosystems, enduring gender inequality, and declining mental health. The four works featured oscillate between naivete and skepticism, and embody the “sad clown” paradox that humor is a veneer thinly veiling uneasiness. Indeed, for anyone who takes seriously the violence of the social and ecological extraction that undergirds contemporary life, this is the kind of humour that hurts. It is the kind of humour that reveals, rather than conceals, the oppression and cruelty that undergird petro-capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, white suprematist, ableist culture. Through videos of therapy game spaces, the reclaiming of stolen images, AI generated technophilic fantasy futures, and a giant inflatable that moves to a rhythm designed to calm the limbic system, Future Perfect invites reflection on the Anthropocentric narcissisms that configure the technophilic everyday.