Houston native Melissa Miller explores the human condition through allegorical landscapes filled animals in the rocky countryside of central Texas. The artist’s daily observation of her local landscape inspires her powerful paintings of imagined scenes. Her narratives resemble the fables of Aesop and Charles Perrault where animals stand in for humans as metaphors for morality and ethics. While Miller’s fables range from lighthearted courtships to mortal struggles between species, the artist ultimately aims to both depicts animal’s interactions in their native environments and her frustrations with her own world.
Although at first glance Miller’s Tapestry appears as an idyllic pastoral scene, upon closer inspection the wild dogs, broken farm equipment, trash, and skeletal remains expose a scene of abandonment and isolation. Through her handling of composition and color, Miller creates an image of despair and neglect that surround that harsh reality of farm life. The animals appear isolated within a landscape dotted with the ruins of farming equipment. Rust and discoloration inform viewers that these once powerful machines are now disregarded and decaying while their sharp points and rough edges emphasis their mincing and dangerous nature. The juxtaposition of the man-made objects within a rural landscape upsets traditional understanding of a landscape painting.
Miller focuses the viewer on this desolate landscape through her lack of a horizon line. In doing so, the artist creates a feeling of isolation by depicting the animals that inhabit the same physical space yet do not interact. Additionally, the cool color palette of greens and blues casts a sense of unease onto the scene. Painted with visibly thick brushstrokes, the blue ground serves as a backdrop for the more realistic images of the animals. Moreover, it takes them out of the ordinary realm of dirt and grass and places them into an unknown space where Miller can comment of issues that are bigger than the everyday actuality of the farm.
Miller showcases her familiarity with the history of art through references to the stacked, vertical composition of medieval tapestries, the cool tones and isolated elements of Giorgio Morandi’s still-lifes and the flatness of Japanese scroll painting. Yet beyond these formal ties to the past, Miller’s deep connection and concern for the native landscape of Central Texas leads the artist to create a painting that speaks to the destruction of the natural environment by the hand of humans. The forgotten relics of machinery acts as reminders of human presence while the barbed wire fence that runs through the lower half of the composition informs viewers this is a marker of someone’s property. The fence with its potentially dangerous barbs places the blame of the destruction of the land onto the human need to own property yet their disregard to maintain and care for the land.
While the artist focuses on Central Texas, this scene of despair could be experienced in many farming communities across the United States. As curator Alison de Lima Greene stated, “In an era when we are becoming increasingly aware of our careless stewardship of this planet, Miller quietly warns us of what is at stake.” Through her allegorical scene that depicts the consequence of human inference with a natural environment, Miller reminder viewers of their responsibly as caretakers for our native surroundings.
