OPENING: Elaine Miles subverts magazine styling of glass in collaborative exhibit in Australia

"Glass Doors", opening on June 11th, will be the inaugural show at The Grey Area gallery in Collingwood, Victoria, as well as the debut of work from a new collaborative project of Australian artist Elaine Miles and photographer Adrian Lander. In experimental works dealing with perspective and light, glass installations will be paired with photographs lining the walls to explore the concept of "photogenic glass," or the kind of stylized images that you might see in a home catalog or interior design magazine and subverting them by creating unnerving tableaus.

In their project, photography reinforces a "precariousness" of a glass piece, which can be seen in a variety of ways depending on lighting, exposure, and arrangment. The quality of light is carefully controlled to evoke a decorative, domestic set-up, not unlike a home catalogue, but the arragements of objects and props creates tension and upends the glamorous photographic techinques. Glass Doors (2015), the namesake installation work of the exhibition, displays finely crafted glass pieces alongside a wooden door, which appears half-buried in the ground, coming out at a jutting slant. An illusory eruption out of the floor, a sea of delicate flowers swarm all around and on the smooth, white ready-made wood object. The glass-blown blooms give a realistic visual of dark, weed-like plants flourishing. Appearing uncontrollable in nature, they're encroaching upon the house door in undomesticated growth. In a preview summary of the show, Miles attests that the doors themselves also hold "phenomenological meaning," as historical parts to a farmhouse once owned by Lord Casey (a governor general in 1965) and Lady Casey (artist, author, aviator). Once part of a home, they were witness to and part of memories. 

The artists' goal is to illustrate such collisions of hand-crafted glass with ready-made objects. Lander, who is a Melbourne-based commercial photographer, shot Miles' work under a view that makes the pieces look like a display in a magazine, to give the desired effect of a "haunting landscape," as also stated in their preview summary. Lander's glossy, aesthetically pleasing shots utilize colorful, transparent glass pieces from Miles' personal Italian style glass collection she's created in the last two decades. He's placed them in particular perspectives of lighting, and documented a specific and meticulous placement, turning Miles' installations into prints that are themselves artworks. 

Miles, a contemporary artist who practices performance, sculpture and installation art, has explored the subject of house objects and domestica in previous exhibitions, such as "Inhabit" at the Wyndham Art Gallery in 2012, where she gave a performance piece among her installations. Glass pieces represented the form of home-like and/or homey objects, like a bed, where a multitude of hand-made and found glass were arranged into an accordian shape up against the low-wall the gallery, the look of it serving as a bed head. Her involvement was a minimal performance of moving through the space to change the placement of single pieces, slowly reassigning the pieces to an ever-evolving new whole. Inspired by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, Miles' latest artwork is constructed with the idea of exploring objects through image and text.

“Part performance and part static exhibit, her artwork consists of video and installation alongside the artist’s intervention with objects in the exhibition space. On interacting with Miles’s evolving installation and performance, one’s focus is directed toward the transition of everyday objects in our indoor (private) and outdoor (public) lives," stated Trent Walters of Linden Art Gallery in 2012, in an effort to describe her work.