UNM junior Billy Joe Miller is working toward a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts in painting and photography. His installation, “Tomorrow is Spring,” opens Friday at 7 p.m. at the Normal Gallery. The show is a multimedia conglomeration of photography, painting and found photos that have been altered digitally, as well as other visual projects set amid antique furniture. Local bands Hedia and North America are also playing looped-cellos and electronic instruments at the show. It’s an occasion to dress up — wear something old and something new, Miller said.
Daily Lobo: You have a lot of antique objects in your home and in your art. Why is that and what is the appeal?
BillyJoe Miller: It’s the fact that more love was put into objects a while back, before the era of mass production. You‘d see something someone made by hand and put love and energy into (in) a more personal way. I feel the same way with buildings and pretty much all the objects produced today. That doesn’t mean that people today aren’t doing just as wonderful things. It’s just not as often. It’s not the mainstream way of creating objects. So it’s not at all that I am interested just in antiques, it’s more that I am interested in objects made with integrity or love. Older objects tend to have that for me. I also really like just what time does to objects.
DL: Yeah, I’ve heard that you can tell certain eras just based on the color of the photo.
BM: That’s a good point, because when I go to antique stores different dealers are like, ‘Well this is from the thirties because this is when they were doing the egg.’ I am attracted to that, not just exclusively, but that’s definitely a part I am drawn to. I am totally drawn to the fact that you end with this … I have this image of a man in a field, and he’s in a rye field, and his hands are thrown up in the air. He’s all but lost in the field and he’s waving for attention. It’s a tiny little photo that I have found, and I blew it up really big for the show. But the idea that he’s in this little field and he’s this little man and he’s waving and I just have that trace of him, and there’s something about that that is so exciting to me. I don’t know if “exciting” is the right word, but it almost feels like he’s trying to communicate. Sometimes, with the people in the photos, there’s almost that feeling that they want to communicate something back to me.
DL: So are you interested in communicating with your photography in the same way?
BM: I definitely am interested in leaving something for people for when I am not here. I like to think that I’ll leave something that can be in conversation with something that was left a hundred years before what I leave.
DL: Can you give me an example?
BM: What happened was I found this old picture of this man on a cliff and I put it into my computer because I was going to alter it and work with it. And I took my iPod out too quick, and it made this green line go straight through the picture of the man on the cliff. It felt so special to me because one, it was time now, technology now showing its mark on an image. And in that sense, to answer your question, a hundred years ago it would be the age of the photo and maybe a hundred years from now they’ll see my iPod line, green, going through the picture.
DL: So you do a pretty interesting thing. You combine the past with the present. What’s that like?
BM: If you just have the old picture you get more of a feeling of nostalgia, and I am not interested in nostalgia … I am working with a feeling and bringing it into now, and so the man and the green line, even though it’s this old photo, it feels very present to me. I am interested in the fact that (the photo is) like a window. Nostalgia is a longing for the past, and what I am interested (in) isn’t a longing, but just an interest in that other world, and in this moment, this fragment that someone leaves by a photograph.
DL: So tell me how you find these photos or fragments from the past.
BM: Hunting or searching for the photo is a really fun part of it. I go to an estate sale, thrift store, antique store and I also do Hospice, so I am confronted with an older generation, which is actually a fairly major part of this interest because I am constantly around 90 year olds who are on their way out.
DL: Oh, can you tell me about working for Hospice more? How has it affected you?
BM: Hospice is nurses
coming to your home to take care of you. Walking into a space definitely has affected me. A lot of times you walk into a space, and you know they haven’t even changed the space for maybe 40, 50 years. You can take a piece off of the wall and you can see white and then there’s smoke stain everywhere else. It feels like I’m walking into another time. What’s fascinating is that it stayed with them for all that time and all those things are just still with them, and they pass, and all those objects get filtered back into the world. That’s one thing I am excited about as a visual artist is you know when I am gone, all these pieces are all over the world, doing the same thing.
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*“Tomorrow is Spring”
The Normal Gallery
1415 4th St. S.W.
Friday
7 p.m.
*
