Apr 26-Aug 30,2016

Hydrographies by Miami-based artist Gardner Cole Miller is a site-specific installation of work presented in the Walgreens Windows project space on 23rd Street and Collins Avenue. Antique quilt remnants crafted by unknown makers in various states of ruinate decay, with threadbare fabrics shredding at the seams spilling their pilled cotton stuffing; fractions and fragments become intimations of former embodiments. Creating a tension between erasure and resistance, the quilts are repeatedly dyed over with indigo. Multiple immersions into the dye vat transform the calico patchworks into a field of activated blue accumulation activating the fabric surface. Among the patchwork of indigo hues, the textures of the quilts reveal lines of topographical stitching. Demarcations of aquatic space charts a non-place marked by an archipelago of voids revealed in the rips and tears. The fragments are entangled in a variable constellation suspended in space and time. Pinned together into an archival hydrography[1], the form exists only temporarily; the whole rests in a solid but transient state, never permanently fixed, ever unfinished.

Gardner Cole Miller is a Miami-based American-Bahamian artist who, as a point of departure, draws upon his experiences growing up a gay little white boy between worlds on a U.S. military base situated in the postcolonial Bahamas. Works in fibers, ceramics, and mixed-media installation explore translations of culture and interactions among peoples across time and place by interrogating the enduring aftermaths of historical circumstance, material history, and the fluid instability of meaning.

[1] hydrography|hīˈdrägrəfē|: the science of surveying and charting the movement of bodies of water, such as oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers.