Senior Art Exhibit 2005: Jorie Miller

The series examines the burning nature of the sun and the fact that the source can never really be seen. It's intensity bruises the natural eye. Film and flash produce extra effects in photos. My intent is to render the effect of direct sunlight as filtered through various constructed scenes.

Optical effects of sunlight do not have a scientific formula, a marked distribution of color and shape. Rather, direct light variably and unpredictably reaches the viewer depending on two measurable factors: 1) his/her own physical movement or position, and 2) the environment in which the light source is being viewed. The environment, then, becomes a unique defining characteristic of light.

The technical color of nature's light is white, an optical mixture of every color. In paint's pigment, however, the same mixture produces a deep brown. Given the opacity of paint, what colors will accurately create the illusion of light, or is it impossible to replicate? In the words of Robert Delaunay, "Light is not a method, it slides toward us, it is communicated to us by our sensibility." With that limitation in mind, these works challenge to freeze the brief moment we acknowledge the source; that moment, literarily speaking, when the flares, rays, color fields, and drops of light seep into the eye. This light bleeds and saturates, illuminates and eclipses, and will continue to push into and around all matter until it burns out.