Two kinds of alchemy: Meghan Miller at the E.B. White Gallery and Ann Resnick at the Salina Art Center
In “Dreaming Canopy” and “Tell Me What You Think of Me, Part One: Something to Divine” two very different artists present meditative, deeply engaging work.
Art has the power to present new ideas and encourage debate, two qualities I often mention from atop my soapbox. But two exhibitions currently on view in El Dorado and Salina are reminders that art can hold space for being as well as thinking.
For “Dreaming Canopy,” on display through October 25 in the Erman B. White Gallery at Butler County Community College, installation artist Meghan Miller created a tie-dyed, psychedelic cloudscape. Multicolored swags of fabric hang from the ceiling and balloon from the walls. In contrast, a pile of neutral-colored cushions and throw rugs encourage visitors to stretch out and stay for a spell — though a bench, couch, or even a bed would make a wider range of visitors more likely to linger.
Pulsing lights add to the sensory experience of “Dreaming Canopy.” Miller collaborated with light artist Mason Talbott, aka Masonlitthat, who deployed colored LED floodlights throughout the gallery. Placed below and behind the canopy, the shifting, pulsing lights alter the color of the textiles and contribute to the installation’s otherworldly quality. A fan discreetly tucked in a corner behind a partition generates white noise, dampening the chatter drifting in from the hallway.
This eight-second video captures the canopy in its colorful motion. Video by Emily Christensen for the SHOUT.
Miller doesn’t bother with artifice. Pieces of the gallery ceiling and walls are visible through the canopy, as are the orange ropes that hang it. Examine the fabric, and you’ll see the simple zig-zag stitching that holds some of the pieces together. Yet, as I lounged on the floor on a Friday afternoon, multiple comparisons came to mind: a treehouse, a float tank, a womb.
The combination of light and pattern in “Dreaming Canopy” also yields surprising references, if you look long enough for them to present themselves. As I lay on a rug in the northeast corner of the gallery, part of the lighted canopy reminded me of “Sunday Green,” a Helen Frankenthaler painting currently on view at WAM. Yet, when I shifted my position to lie directly underneath that spot, the similarity I’d noticed out of the corner of my eye disappeared.
Views from the floor: Meghan Miller invite visitors to "Dreaming Canopy to stretch how and view her installation from all angles. Photos by Emily Christensen for the SHOUT.
Miller, a Towanda, Kansas-based artist who holds a Master of Fine Arts in studio art from Wichita State, is well known for creating fantastical-yet-figural worlds. Recent examples include the faux campfires of “Breathing Fire” at the Wichita Art Museum and the thickets of native Kansas flora made from paper in her 2022 thesis exhibition “The Midnight Garden Coffee Shop” at the Fisch Haus.
In comparison, “Dreaming Canopy” feels like an abrupt departure from form. But two elements connect the exhibition to her larger body of work. The first is Miller’s talent for instigating gatherings. Vintage webbed folding chairs encircling the “Breathing Fire” campfires invited visitors to sit and exchange stories, and the artist served cookies and coffee to visitors who dropped in on her thesis exhibition-slash-coffee-shop. We can also see this impulse in Miller's collaborations with other artists, including Hallie Linnebur and Miller's husband Mike Miller. In "Dreaming Canopy," she brings a new collaborator into her process.
Finally, Miller has always conjured magic from the mundane. This applies to both materials (tissue paper, yarn) and subject matter. For example, many gardeners consider the plants represented in “Midnight Garden,” (pokeweed, trumpet vines) to be unwelcome weeds. “I was thinking about uncovering the magic that’s all around us,” Miller said in a 2022 interview. “I think overlooked things are full of possibility, and that’s pretty magical to me.”
Mason Talbott used LED floodlights to make the canopy change color. Photos by Emily Christensen for the SHOUT.
In “Dreaming Canopy,” Miller pushes this preoccupation as far as she can take it. At the E.B. White Gallery, she created a space for daydreaming and relaxation by harnessing a pile of old bedsheets and a technique associated more with elementary-school classrooms than white-wall galleries. If she can manifest an art environment from these humble resources, she can, in fact, make magic out of almost anything.
Through “Dreaming Canopy,” Miller demonstrates that we can, too. Most of us can access a tub of water, some cheap dye, and a few old linens — or other, similarly everyday materials that don’t require expensive tools or even the art-making skills of someone like Miller. We can invite our friends into our creative worlds, to help us discover our own ways of transforming our kitchens and offices and bedrooms — the places where we create and collaborate and dream.
Ann Resnick is another artist with a long history of using humble materials in her work. “Tell Me What You Think of Me, Part One: Something to Divine,” on view through December 29 at the Salina Art Center, includes spray-painted works she created with old handmade stencils. A series of ghostly, large-scale works on paper or mylar hang from the walls of the gallery, banner-like, slightly undulating. A lightbox series installed at its center resembles a low altar.
Though the works in "Something to Divine" look very similar at first glance, extended viewing reveals they are each wildly different. Each untitled image offers viewers the opportunity to make visual connections: to Rorschach inkblots, scrollwork, shadows, pressed foliage. Within the tangled patterns, recognizable shapes appear: faces, animals, flowers. “Engaging with these works highlights our fundamental human tendency to look for meaning everywhere and anywhere,” curator Ksenya Gurshtein wrote in the exhibition text.
Had I not seen “Dreaming Canopy” and “Something to Divine” within weeks of one another, I’m not sure I would have ever connected Miller and Resnick, artists of different generations, one working principally in three dimensions, the other in two. In her meticulously produced work, Resnick makes sense of data she’s collected. “Something to Divine” will be followed by a second, larger exhibition at the Salina Art Center in 2026. It will include her art-based analysis of information she collects during the run of “Something to Divine,” including the handwriting of gallery visitors, their Meyers-Briggs personality types, and the results of a survey Resnick created. Through her investigations, Resnick hopes to better understand our divisive social landscape.
This approach feels worlds away from Miller’s, whom I can’t picture talking about data, much less incorporating it into her artmaking. Still, after viewing these two exhibitions, I’m convinced their practices are more alike than I imagined. “Chapter and Verse,” a major exhibition at the Ulrich Museum of Art in 2022 (also curated by Gurshtein), afforded me an opportunity to spend a great deal of time with work by Resnick, who has been based in Wichita since 1995. In a review for Art Focus, I described the almost hallucinogenic quality of the exhibition. “Underneath their conceptual scaffolding, her works are the byproduct of laborious, meditative processes. As such, they carry a weight detached from more obvious ways of understanding.”
Works by Ann Resnick from "Tell Me What You Think of Me, Part One: Something to Divine." Courtesy images by Dimitri Skliris.
In Salina, I felt myself once again drawn into Resnick’s work, the impact of which is diminished in photographs. Though she made most of the images with spray paint on regular-weight paper or thin sheets of mylar, they appear multilayered, almost encaustic-like. Viewing them felt similar to spotting a work of abstraction in a swag of colorfully lighted tie-dye: What I knew strained against what I saw.
Both “Dreaming Canopy” and “Something to Divine” ask that viewers slow down, pay attention, and stay a while. Yet both shows are accessible to anyone who has the time to look and a mind open to different kinds of understanding — maybe even magic.
The Details
“Dreaming Canopy”
September 23-October 25, 2024, at the Erman B. White Gallery on the Butler County Community College campus, 901 S. Haverhill Rd. Building 700 in El Dorado, Kansas
Hours: The gallery is open to the public from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday.
Free
Learn more about “Dreaming Canopy” and the E.B. White Gallery. Find a map of the BCCC campus here.
“Tell Me What You Think of Me, Part One: “Something to Divine”
September 25-December 29, 2024 at the Salina Art Center, 242 S. Santa Fe Ave. in Salina, Kansas
Hours: The Salina Art Center is open to the public 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 11a.m.-7 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays, and 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sundays.
Free
Learn more about “Something to Divine.”
Corrections: This review was updated on October 31 with two changes to the part about Ann Resnick's exhibition. First, the series of six light boxes at the center of the gallery are not installed on a low plinth, but instead are backed so they are raised slightly off the ground, almost as though they are floating.
Secondly, while visitors are invited to identify figures they see within the abstract works, this information will not be analyzed by the artist as part of her second exhibition. We regret the errors.
Emily Christensen is a freelance journalist and news entrepreneur based in Wichita, Kansas. She is a co-founder of the SHOUT.
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