Opening reception, Thursday April 21, 2011, 7-9 p.m.

Liz Miller is creating a new site-specific installation for her MAEP exhibition. The work will consist of two- and three-dimensional, wall-mounted and freestanding components cut from industrial felt. Throughout her career, Miller has completely transformed gallery and public spaces with her riotously colored installations. The viewer is immediately pulled into the fastidious complexity of her craft and the beauty of natural and manufactured networks; the work seems to crawl, grow, and swallow up space. As a site-specific artist, Miller has spent many hours researching the MIA and its collection. She is especially interested in the Asian, African, and European collections of weapons and armor, and will find creative means to incorporate these objects into her installation.

“A Field Guide to Snow and Ice” is Paula McCartney’s photographic essay of images that recall the northern winter, including falling snow, icicles, and snowdrifts. But McCartney doesn’t work in a straightforward documentary style; she combines the grandeur of landscape photographs with delicate figure studies. She uses technical sleights of hand to affect scale; snowdrifts that appear larger than human scale are actually small piles of gypsum sand, and slender icicles are calcite stalactites that grow anonymously, over centuries, in caves. McCartney doesn’t look for images; she makes them. Her craft in shooting and printing her photographs is exacting; she is just as precise in her critique of assumptions about the truth-telling, indexical, and documentary aspects of photographic image making.

Generous support for MAEP is provided by The McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation.