Borderline
Kristene Miller

Borderline is Kristene Miller’s newest body of work that explores the boundaries that exist within traditional figurative relief sculpture. The exhibition includes sculptures and drawings that allude to, and expand upon, traditional relief media and methods and indicate the process and transitions between two and three-dimensional artwork.

Miller studies the formal and architectural elements of relief sculpture, and plays upon the function of physical borders and space. Contending with formal and compositional structure, the artist explores various shapes of reliefs and types of borders. Changing format also questions “what defines a border”? – the edge of the matrix, the contour of a projecting figure, or the negative space around the whole work? Miller’s previous work in Fragment: An Initial Passage (2000) also explored the combination of figures with architecture, and the function and format of relief sculpture.

Miller also examines the physical and emotional borders that exist within the figures, and their function within the relief. By changing how figures are placed within a space, the figures can respond to their physical environment. Traditionally, figures are placed to fit compositionally within a space, but they have no implied awareness of the confinement of the space. Miller’s figures physically and emotionally respond to the space as they crouch into a corner, or extend to grasp the borders of the sculpture.

Borderline alludes to the traditional functions of relief sculpture as narrative, scenic, religious, memorial, and so on. It reveals the ambiguities within relief sculpture, and asks the viewer to consider borderlines within space, composition and style. Conventional techniques include the creation of a triptych, a progression in narrative, and repetition of forms. These familiar elements are then paired with explorations in media and figure/ground relationships. Miller also changes how the viewer looks at a relief sculpture by choosing various modes of traditional and non-traditional placement within the exhibition space.

Kristene Miller has created an opportunity for discourse and discovery in Borderline as she pays homage to traditional relief sculpture and questions its structure and function.

Kristene Miller received her MFA in figurative sculpture from the University of Alberta in 2000. Her work has been exhibited at Harcourt House, VAAA, The Front Gallery, The Edmonton Art Gallery, FAB Gallery, Latitude 53, The Fringe Gallery and Grant MacEwan College. She has received scholarships and awards from The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the University of Alberta and The Edmonton Business Council. Kristene currently lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta.

gallery  Rothenburger