Category archives: Graphic Designer

  • I once had a friend ask me, "What exactly is graphic design?" The answer seemed pretty easy, as the name appears self-explanatory: design using graphics. But, truthfully, it was harder for me to get into the details of what exactly it is, even though it has been one of the most prolific and widely-used art forms in the modern era. And not unlike some other forms of modern art, there is the hackneyed response, "I could totally do that" while viewing graphic design that has been elevated to a higher status. In fact, I even heard it at the Cooper Hewitt's long-running installation How Posters Work. Amazing to hear that response, given the museum's breadth of information presented about not only about the history of the medium but also contemporary approaches to it. Furthermore, the beginning of the exhibit, before really immersing the viewer in the posters themselves, contains a section attempting to relay just how graphic designers see, and how it subsequently affects how we decipher messages from images, be they subversive or overt. For example, how designers use black space, how they visualize colors to lay over each other and blend, and the ways in which they see text aligned on a poster to result in certain reading patterns. That was particularly interesting as areas of posters are darkened except one swirl-type shape, and it notes that eyes begin at the thicker portion of the illuminated swirl, and move down to the thinner part across the page. Images are placed alo[...]
  •   Me From Myself is a series of short duets that grew from a piece I began at Hunter College. The score is a series of poems, and the duets examine the bifurcation Emily Dickinson suggests in her poem of the same title. Using two dancers costumed identically and a wordscore that abstractly wonders through identity formation and internal struggle, the piece is a meditation on how we construct and view ourselves. The piece was one of my first that directly dealt with the relationship between the body and language, and with identity construction based on language. It is modern dance with an even-handed pace throughout the piece, meant to evoke meditative contemplation.   More images from more work coming soon!
  • May 19th - reading of Justin Maxwell's An Outopia for Pigeons June 24, 28, 29th: Out of Frame: Dance + Comics - A bill that features collaborations between choreographers and sequential artists as part of The Comic Book Theater Festival at The Brick Theater. Curated by Patrice Miller, and featuring In Pieces, a new dance work by Miller, giving live animation to the illustrations of Marion Fayolle. Ongoing: The Geography of Healing. I am crowd-sourcing narrative, and creating a piece that questions the concept of a "healing journey". Is healing a journey or is it a place we encounter? You can participate and watch its evolution over at www.geographyofhealing.wordpress.com The full performance piece will be produced in December.
  • In process site: www.patricemiler1.wix.com/patricemiller Geography of Healing: www.geographyofhealing.wordpress.com On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/patrice.miller.52 And Twitter @MsPatriceMiller And Linked-In (Patrice Miller) And the Matrix (looking for a green pill).
  • Hello! I am currently keeping a blog for my year-long Spark & Echo Arts commissioned project over at www.geographyofhealing.wordpress.com - You can read up what I am to there and at my temporary site, www.patricemiller1.wix.com/patricemiller Thanks for stopping by!
  • I am a director, choreographer, and arts educator currently living and working in New York City. My work has been presented at 3-Legged Dog, La MaMa Etc, Theater Row, Prelude/CUNY Graduate Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Brick, FRINGENYC, and non-theater spaces like outside of the 68th Street subway stop, NYCFashion Week, and 571 Projects. I particularly enjoy creating work that is interdisciplinary, "idea-driven", and good, weird, fun. I have choreographed Vaclav Havel's last piece, a story about finding pork in Communist Czechslovakia, and have turned Theodore Roosevelt into a bullmoose as he gave his famous shot-at-the-podium speech. I have been thinking about where language and gesture/the body meet and depart for a long, long time. The longer I practice, the more I appreciate the geography (time+place) of this dance between words and bodies. I even studied English and Dance at Hunter College, creating work that explored this interaction between linguistics and the body. For me, the act of creating performance work is a sacred and wacky exploration of our interior worlds, which have very big impacts on our exterior worlds. It is the dialogue of the micro with the macro. Wear a hardhat!
  • I think that even for those of us who love to talk about art and theories of art, artist statements are painful at worst, awkward at best. So, I would like to start mine by being honest about that. I love what I do, and as anyone who spends more than five minutes with me will attest to, I love to talk about theater and dance. But to come out and say what I do in very specific terms, to try to explain what it is like to wake up in the morning thinking about my current show, what it is like to constantly be trying to put the pieces of the world around you into some kind of whole to give back to that world, is hard. So here are some honest thoughts about that. "Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it". I found this quote when I was first really getting to know Vaclav Havel a couple of years back, I wish I could tell you which publication/speech/interview it is from, but I cannot. It's something I wrote down in a notebook and have kept around me for years. I love the physicality of this quote, I love that Havel instructs us to get to our lowest points, it is the only way to see. This quote has guided me to this meditation on performance, which is what I stick to for now: Performance is the safe space where we descend, as Orpheus did, to test our mettle and merit, to find what lies beneath the masks & costumes we don to maint[...]