Charred fruits – lemons, limes, oranges, bananas, plantains – litter the floor of the gallery; their once thick skins so completely parched by cooking in an oven that they completely disintegrate when stepped on. Such messy, smelly decay is the setting for Joshua Miller’s solo exhibition, “YESTERDAYS CAMEL.” Named after the skeleton of the 10,000-year-old beast found in the tar pits of La Brea, the exhibit hints at the passage of time, technological antiquity and a dubious belief in a better future.
On the floor, among the burnt and dehydrated products, is “Pilgrim”, 2020–, an ongoing series of severed ceramic heads. While one has a penis thrust grotesquely into its mouth, another appears to be drowning in the gallery’s concrete floor – all of these entities appear to be trapped in a tortured Boschian hell with no hope of salvation. Hanging on the wall above this scene of scatological depravity, four bas-relief tiles spell out the word “home,” like a forbidding sign of welcome, in a medieval font reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts.
Perhaps even more intimate than the idea of ”home” are those touchscreen features of an iPhone (microphone, lock button, camera) with which we are never disconnected. Enlarged renderings of the various components of the device, arranged in a rough grid, appear in iPhone, 2018, one of Miller’s major taxonomic paintings. While the papyrus-inspired yellowed reds, browns and whites of the canvas serve to aesthetically unite the disjunctions that characterize the exhibition by documenting a relic of the contemporary (in this case, models created before the date of the work), the work foreshadows the immanent archaism of its subject, and that of all things – including humanity – in the long and relentless arc of history.
