Reuben Lorch-Miller, Samsara
January 11 - February 23, 2019

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Et al. presents

Reuben Lorch-Miller
Samsara
January 11 - February 23, 2019
Chinatown, San Francisco

With Samsara, Reuben Lorch-Miller continues his 25 years of basement shows. For this show at Et Al., Lorch-Miller created three new works – two original photographic pieces and one large sculpture. The photographs, taken with his phone while on walks and printed as large-scale assembled photocopies, continue his long running practice of using photocopying as a printmaking technique. Made by printing the image in scaled sections on separate 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper and then reassembling the image, they depict two forms of abstracted figuration at two distinct stages of life. The sculpture is the largest he has ever made. It is comprised of 100 separate interlocking panels – 50 of which had been hidden for the past 30 years in a closet of a Midwestern art school. Through a series of direct physical interventions, these 50 objects have been psychologically encoded by past participants and collaborators. The second 50 pieces were recently fabricated by the artist. This sculpture is created through the composition of these 100 modular pieces and is custom made for the space, in collaboration with the architecture. It is assembled on-site through an intuitive and responsive process of building. It will only appear in this arrangement during the duration of the exhibition. By its own nature, it is impermanent – never taking the same form twice. When the exhibition is over, it will be disassembled and await its next rendition. By fully engaging the space, the artist potentially creates a long loop or traversable path for the viewer, with the sculpture acting as the axis and the photographs as poles or markers. Samsara is a Sanskrit word that comes out of the religious and philosophical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. It is often understood as endless wandering, the mundane wheel of existence and the suffering-laden cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Reuben Lorch-Miller is a Brooklyn, NY based artist and educator. His studio practice encompasses sculpture, collage, photography, artist books, music and performance. Lorch-Miller was raised in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, later earning an MFA in New Practices from San Francisco State University. He has often exhibited at DIY art spaces, participated in artist-run residencies and produced multiple self-published zines and artist books under the imprint Ancient Remains.

Lorch-Miller has also exhibited at The Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA) and MoMA/PS1 (NY), Jackie Klempay Gallery (NY), Plexus Projects (NY). He has been an artist-in-residence at Land and Sea (Oakland, CA), Rocksbox (Portland, OR), SIM (Reykjavik, Iceland), The Shandaken Project (Shandken, NY), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and Bauernmark 9 (Vienna, Austria). His work is held in the collections of MOMA, The Tacoma Art Museum, SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum, and Brooklyn Museum of Art.

He has been a visiting artist and lecturer at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, Rhode Island School of Design, Conceptual Oregon Performance School, Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute and Pratt Institute. His recordings and books have been published by Radical Documents (Los Angeles, CA), Good Press (Glasgow, UK), Land and Sea (Oakland, CA) and Heinzfeller Nielistist (New York, NY).