Tracy Miller at Feature

In her second show at Feature in as many years, Tracy Miller continued her disarming and exuberant exploration of excess, in still-life paintings of food (mostly) that were the pretext for a smorgasbord of painterly techniques--cornucopias of visual pleasures that stood in for gustatory ones. Employing a predominantly high-key palette of yellows, reds and pinks, with judicious notes of blue, blue-green and brown, Miller's paintings teem with as much activity and information as iit seems they can bear, deliberately flirting with surfeit. Painterly abstraction is at least as integral to these works as their still-life components are, and their dizzying visual generosity underlines the symbiotic relationship between food and paint, and the inherently sustaining nature of both.

The organizing principle of the paintings is additive. Everything is allowed, as long as it looks good. Abstract tachist spots and ovoids (some of which can double as cakes, pies, platters or doilies), spidery sideways drips, translucent glazes, meandering lines, insouciant arabesques: all are piled together with descriptively painted food, cans and bottles of beer, casually drawn tulips, big red roses that might have escaped from a chintz curtain, and a pineapple upside-down cake fresh from the pages of a 1950s women's magazine. Some elements are painted with a near trompe I'oeil veracity, which pulls them out of the spatially ambiguous medium of colorful abstract marks, smears and spots in which they seem to float. Two fish materialize in almost schlocky impasto on a blue handpainted plate. A cake in Blue Ribbon is "frosted" with swaths of rich chocolate-brown paint, while the beading of pink rosettes around the top of a cake in Pie Hole was evidently squeezed through a real pastry bag. The possibility that the whole image may be riddled with trompe l'oeil is implied by the fact that Miller apparently likes to bake and decorate cakes and petits fours in the shapes of cases of beer, packs of cigarettes, roast turkey and other foods. That box of doughnuts, piece of sushi, pineapple, lobster mold, banana or ham sandwich might really be just cake, a teasing ambiguity that also serves to point up the obvious fact that what they really are is paint.

Born in Storm Lake, Iowa, Miller got her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley, and some influence of East Bay Funk is perhaps discernible in her work, which in its sly humor, irreverence and playfulness can put one in mind of a Roy de Forest without dogs, a Joan Brown of the tabletop. Her passionate engagement in the act and traditions of painting--obvious in the work--is confirmed, too, in her eagerly acknowledged roster of art heroes, an eclectic bunch that includes Goya, Stettheimer, Cezanne, van Gogh and Fairfield Porter. Nearer to hand, one might detect, or imagine, relationships to Sally Egbert's work in some of the airier abstract passages, early Roberto Juarez in the kitchen lyricism of flowers and fruit, or Thomas Trosch in the works' deliberately overwrought impasto and witty tone--none of which take away from the paintings' freshness, originality and largeness of spirit.

--Nathan Kernan

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