James Miller: Doppler Highway: WINDOW, 91 Walker Street New York, NY (corner of Walker and Lafayette Street)
Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce James Miller's exhibition at WINDOW, Doppler Highway, opening Friday, May 8th, with a reception from 6-8pm.
Miller’s approach to painting is influenced by cameraless photography, projection, and imaging technologies. Past works have referenced themes from paranormal photography, X-rays, and deep-sea imaging. For his site-specific installation at WINDOW, the artist engages with cinematic projection techniques and practical effects, in particular, low-tech means of rendering artificial galactic, fantastical spaces. Lo-Fi Sci-FI.
The complex surfaces of Miller's new paintings are created with reflective materials and reactive pigments that catch and scatter light. Presented within the glass-enclosed space, they interact with the changing lighting conditions, movements, and interferences inherent to the surrounding environment.
It rained heavily overnight, marking the street with pools of varying size. Their presence a fugitive reminder of how uneven our ground really is. As people drift by in the now still air, these glass-like surfaces strobe diffuse morning light, which appears shockingly bright against the coarse middle grays of concrete, dirt, asphalt. Like camera obscurers, they proffer a different reality: one where a decontextualized architectural form may instead rest on top of the sky—where down isn’t down, it’s up.
Clear rainwater often collects in the same place. As the day goes on, it reactivates various substances from previous spills—churned up by the passing of cars, or an absent-minded step. The clarity of ‘image’, that once sat on top of gravel and old gum, now bound below a suspension of oils and particulates. The readability of any given reflection is contingent upon the nature and degree of its intervention. This is what it is like—to make a painting.
Scotchlite™ is a reflective material composed of microscopic glass spheres, arranged in a way that causes light to be returned in the direction of its source—instead of bouncing off and away, like with a mirror. From the perspective of light’s origin, the fabric’s neutral grey color itself becomes a jarring radiant surface. When used as the ground for a painting, the shifting quality of the material may at any moment push the artist’s record—once peacefully on top—down and out of the way. Within this framework, the act of reading and reflection is rendered very unstable; something that may be replaced rather than simply delivered. All of this becomes dizzying in relation to the way the artist produces his work: literally projecting the atomized stuff of paint out of a nozzle, within a self-made enclosure; to create an atmosphere of paint that slowly settles on the surface of a canvas.
When people walk by this window—itself an aperture of sorts—the flip of their reflection will join a tangle of ghostly images—as happens with any storefront, or perhaps a theatre. Flashes of silver might leap forward to pull them in; to join the jagged and fractured compositions that are reminiscent of shattered glass. Like new rain rippling a pool of reflection, the surface reorganizes. What was held is returned. – Ian Miyamura (2026)
