On this sand (together)
Jenny Irene Miller
2024 F.E.A.R.S Artist
October 24 - November 30, 2024
GOCA Project Space
Ent Center for the Arts
On this sand (together)
Jenny Irene Miller
Storytelling grounds my work. I'm an artist who uses photography. My larger portfolio contains works made with video, sound, and sculpture. My art practice is grounded in all of this: place, Indigeneity, queerness, and familial and community relations. I am inspired by kinship, home, and our stories. This allows me to further understand my knowledge of self and ways of knowing that have been instilled in me by my family, culture, and experiences. The work I make is quiet and explores notions of identity, place, refusal, and access through portraiture and nonhuman photographs. It makes room for Indigenous and queer-centered stories to take shape, to be acknowledged and shared.
Photography provides a space for me to practice a form of careful observation that runs deep in the Inupiaq culture I come from. My art practice considers the ability of a photograph to share stories, to recall people and memories, and how it has been used as a weapon in the colonial project. I closely consider what I give. To refuse is to exercise extraordinary power.
My creative practice is informed by research. I continue to expand upon an interdisciplinary approach that includes my familial and communal oral histories and archives. I'm working to engage research and knowledge into works that reimagine a colonial past; and in doing so, I center a contemporary presence that defines the many possibilities of Indigenous futurity. It's a future that's centered in kinship, place, joy, humor, queer love, protection, and refusal.
Read an original essay about Jenny Irene Miller’s work by UCCS Teaching Professor of Visual Arts, Stacy J. Platt.
IMPORTANT DATES
Exhibition on View
October 24 - November 30, 2024
Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 24th, 2024, 5-7 pm
GOCA Project Space | Ent Center for the Arts
*no registration required
VACS Lecture:
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024, 6-7 pm
Chapman Recital Hall | Ent Center for the Arts
*registration required, tickets available below
F.E.A.R.S. is an artist residency series founded in 2018 and co-hosted by UCCS VAPA and GOCA.
Gallery hours:
Thursday - Saturday, 1 - 6 pm, or by appointment
email: gallery@uccs.edu | call: 719.255.3504
About
Jenny Irene Miller
Jenny Irene Miller, Inupiaq, (b. Sitŋasuaq / Nome, Alaska, she/her and they/them) is an artist working primarily with photography. Her work focuses on identity, community, the familial archive, memory, and place. The poetics found in what is seen or refused in Jenny’s images make important contributions to her work. Jenny lives and works in Dgheyay Kaq' / Anchorage, Alaska.
Jenny holds an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico, a BFA in Photomedia and a BA in American Indian Studies from the University of Washington. She is a past Beaumont Newhall/Van Deren Coke Photography Fellow at UNM, SITE Santa Fe Scholar, Elizabeth Furber Fellow, and Fulbright Canada Killam Fellow.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently in a solo exhibition at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, AK, and in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, NM. In 2023, Jenny made the 2023 Silver List, organized by Silver Eye Center for Photography based in Pittsburg, PA.
Jenny is a recipient of awards from Photographers Without Borders, Nia Tero, Alaska Humanities Forum, National Geographic, Fulbright Canada, and a Fulbright Canada Killam Fellowship to Canada. Her work has been featured by Inuit Art Quarterly, The New York Times, National Geographic, Canadian Art, and Lenscratch among others. Jenny’s work is currently held in the collections at Turchin Center for the Visual Arts and at the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College as well as in private collections. She is represented in New Mexico by Foto Forum Santa Fe.
Photos and Videos by Stellar Propeller Studio, Joshua Dorado, and Lynné Bowman Cravens , for the Galleries of Contemporary Art at UCCS, 2024