Bennett Miller. Gagosian Gallery

About

With these works, Miller continues to link the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) with the history of the photographic image, posing questions around the contingent and enigmatic nature of perception. The results are imbued with a melancholic aura that manifests from the experience of loss and the inexorable passage of time.

With their sepia tones and grainy textures, the prints intimate a liminal state of a world in flux. Their subjects, whether figures gazing outward or landscapes bearing silent witness to time’s passage, are quietly surreal, their distinct ambiguity and ethereal qualities resisting reasoned interpretation.

A central image of the exhibition is that of a Melvillean whale whose body rests on a theatrical stage, an anonymous figure in silhouette standing before it. The scenario evokes a jarring dislocation from the natural order and the disquieting application of human intelligence and ingenuity.

Elsewhere, the anonymity of Miller’s image of a mother and child and the eerie haziness of his depiction of a uniformed army cadet are similarly evocative of modernity’s disjunctions. A recurring motif that probes the individual’s place within a collective march forward, when considered as a work created with AI, becomes a meta-commentary on the role of technology in art.

With their uncanny atmosphere, Miller’s works draw on historical attempts to produce believable images of invented phenomena, including spiritualist photographs and Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths’s staged shots of the “Cottingley Fairies.” The newest studies of people and places in the current exhibition represent a temporal hop forward from the late nineteenth-century aesthetics that characterized Miller’s debut exhibition to include works evocative of early-to-mid-twentieth-century America. While still hovering on the edge of recognizability, they frustrate any attempt at precise naming or location, as they envision imagined histories beyond the reach of memory and echo sentiments of nostalgia, loss, and the ephemeral nature of existence.