Weston Teruya welcomes artists, arts administrators, and cultural workers of color to get real about their lives, practices, and careers. Each episode is an in-depth look into how art gets made, but more importantly how these folks are seeing to the system of art’s (UN)making.
In this episode of the podcast, we talk with artist, educator, and cultural organizer Gabby Miller. Gabby’s work often utilizes remnants from the global transportation of goods--including the corrugated sides of steel shipping containers and crude oil--to examine imperialism, climate change, war, family history, and the movement of capital and people. In her recent projects, she also occasionally juxtaposes this evidence of the international supply chain with spaces for contemplation and communal exchange, whether room for meditation or a shared gallery on a cargo ship. We discuss how she started creating work in Hanoi with the Nha San Collective, climate change, and how meditative practice intersects with her deconstruction of global capitalism.
Press / Recorded Things
This is a great 8 part podcast series that begins with me connecting my research on the global supply chain to my parent's love story. In the first episode, I get to talk about my trip across The Pacific on The Gemini.
Listen on SOUNDCLOUD , itunes.com/containers , and 99% Invisible or read the full transcript on medium.com
Luis Walking in “'Nổ cái bùm': Một tuần lễ nghệ thuật đương đại ở Huế
Gabby Miller: Artist for the Future. Connect Magazine, Summer 2020. Article PDF.
“Gabby turned a traditional black box theater into an oracle machine which was, in fact, a wormhole, with the purpose to communicate with enlightened beings from different galaxies. The series of events and exchanges that took place in the oracle machine were designed to transcend three-dimensional existence,” says Daniel J. Martinez, professor of art, Miller’s thesis advisor and closest mentor.
“Gabby is asking us to consider and reflect upon the possibility of how to reimagine our own humanity,” Martinez adds.
(un)making Episode 17: Gabby Miller, Art Practical Audio
Hand-Copying the Constitution and other Responses to Trump, Hyperallergic 2018
This New Museum Imagines a World Where Capitalism Is Dead, Artsy
How The Vietnam War Gave Birth to Container Shipping - And Changed The World, Digg.com
Episode 1: Welcome To Global Capitalism , Medium.com
Artist Gabby Miller Journeyed From Oakland to China by Cargo Ship, KQED
Gabby Miller as Cross-Cultural Cargo, East Bay Express
Q&A: Making art and getting in trouble in Vietnam, LA Times
Julia Bryan-Wilson on Dream of Things That Have Never Been But Someday Will Be in MIT Press
In Oakland, where I live, and at UC Berkeley, where I teach, Occupy has been defiant, fractious, exhausting, exhilarating. The zone of possibilities it promised was threatened by ruthlessly violent state and administrative pushback and the repressive criminalization of dissent. Cops wielding batons, rubber bullets, and pepper spray: these are searing images. But other scenes persist—a port closed by thousands of anti-capitalist demonstrators; tents set afloat in sly compliance of a campus “no encampment” decree. Which imaginings do we privilege? One Occupy Oakland poster placed DREAM OF THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN BUT SOMEDAY WILL BE above a large blank space, extending an invitation for you to fill its void. Here I take my cue from that multi-vocal, open-ended impulse.
Catherine Drake, Art Forum for Discover Eliava Project
In Conversation: Queer Art & Activism
Return to Roots, Surface Asia Magazine
Some Writing
Đẫm Queer / Queer Lust: Open Dialogue, Nguyễn Quốc Thành, Gabby Miller Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 15 No. 1, Winter 2020; (pp. 107-123)
Skylines Without Flying People (Exhibition Essay) (2011)
No, you are not dreaming: Nha San Studio & Emergence of Experimental Art in Vietnam (2011)
Hinterlands Press Release (2012)