Presented by Mills Pond House Gallery

Ali Miller will exhibit January 16 - February 12, 2016. Raised in Long Island, Ali Miller received the Hoffberger Fellowship Award to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art where she earned an MFA in Painting. “My work weaves personal fantasies and anxieties about the unknown into surreal staged scenes. Through saturated colors, high contrast, theatrical lighting, and varied surface textures, I create exaggerated, romantic worlds gone awry. I use these extremes to convey a confliction of emotional truths. The cornucopia opulence is sometimes ecstatic and sometimes a choking, suffocating illusion.” The ideals of perfection and beauty are prevailing themes in my work. My paintings ask, what does an ideal moment, romance, or atmosphere look like? This same lens is applied to the paint, scrutinizing ideal compositions, color palettes, and techniques, while embracing a level of uncertainty, tension, experimentation, and obsession. The result of my process is a space more ornate and more beautiful than that which I inhabit; it is at once a stage for the fantastical expectations of my life and a space for contemplating the disparity between the real and the imagined.