PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Christopher Miles: Bloom, the first solo museum exhibition of work by Los Angeles artist Christopher Miles, curated by art writer Constance Mallinson. On view in the museum’s Back Gallery from March 10 to July 28, 2013, the exhibition includes recent works constructed out of acrylic paint and paper over aluminum armatures—a kind of ambitious update of the papier-mâché method. Bridging painting and sculpture, the works formally address the artist’s combined preoccupations with threedimensional form and forming, material presence and spatial actuality, texture and surface, as well as color, mark, light, and visual effect.

The works stem from Miles’ ongoing interests in sculpture as constructed form and the expressive potential of sculpture—interests that he has explored in his ceramic sculptures. Abstract yet evocative, and riddled with crevices, openings, and protrusions that compel viewers to bob and weave while looking, the sculptures are designed to be engaging and confronting from all angles. Miles examines the peripatetic experience of sculpture, in the evocative and associative potential of form, and in the pleasure that comes with exploring the relationship between exterior and interior. The sculptures immerse the viewer in an awareness of the present that shifts from one moment to the next.

The work provokes an experience that unfolds in time and space, but also in the viewer’s associations. Miles explains “in the experience of a work, one might find suggestions of terrestrial, celestial, plant, animal, human, and machine form; one might encounter the humorous, the seductive, the beautiful, the tragic, the repellant, and the corrupt; one might find that the lovely and the monstrous are just around the bend from one another, that slick and rough, machined and hewn can coexist, that light touch can conspire with blunt trauma.”

Christopher Miles completed his BA at the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, and his MFA at the School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California. He is an award-winning writer and curator who published extensively between 1995 and 2010, and continues to write and curate. His work has been included in multiple exhibitions in Southern California since 2010. Miles has taught at multiple art schools and departments in Southern California, and has taught at California State University, Long Beach, since 1998. At CSULB, he served as Chair of the Department of Art from 2010 to 2012. He served briefly as the inaugural Director of the new CSULB School of Art, and now serves as the interim Dean of the CSULB College of the Arts.