• born in 1959 in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
• mother born in Calgary, Alberta; father born in Ukraine; maternal grandparents from Poland
• B.F.A. (1982), and M.F.A. (1990), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia

click on thumbnails at left to view larger images

Textile art initiated Mindy Miller into the labour intensive and repetitive processes which continue to shape her installations. These time-consuming tasks have ritualistic overtones and form part of politicized artistic processes, demonstrating Miller’s alignment with the realm of women's domestic work. In I Fell Asleep (1989-1992) Miller collected used clothing, washed, folded, and piled these clothes and then arranged them in a row of low rectangular piles, resembling beds, along the wall of a condemned industrial building in Halifax. Miller's physical engagement with the clothing became a way of getting to know the wearers, sensing their former bodily presence and marking the garments with her own body imprints. Miller's intense contact with the clothing is an act of retrieval, in which the artist reclaims and reconstructs their stories, memories, and experiences. The absent body becomes a powerful presence which resonates throughout, one with which Miller communes and which fuels her creative process. She has connected the clothes to a concern with the Holocaust which stemmed from her father’s teachings: "I was told by my father that it was a moral imperative that I stay Jewish, that I was not to assimilate because six millions Jews had been murdered and countless generations had been persecuted simply because they were born Jewish. By the age of four I recognized myself as living on top of a pile of corpses. I was tied to history through death" (1991). The endless piles of clothes resembled to her the clothes of Jews that had been piled and sorted through after mass killings during World War II. "The materials I use are dirty with history: discarded used clothing and more recently human hair, carry the residue of people. The handling of this residue wears on me. I engage with the materials literally, through folding, hanging, piling and burning in an attempt to give the work the life of 'having once been'" (1993). During the time Miller was working on I Fell Asleep, she completed other installations with a similar theme. Mount Sorrow (1989) is an installation using tin cans that read "Mount" and "Sorrow" installed in bays that are lined with piles of clothing. In O Jerusalem (Why Does She Do This) (1989-1990), Miller torched polyester garments which were then placed on the floor, and rubbed the charcoal from their burning into the walls, leaving charcoal residue on the floor as well. She began using human hair in Absence Escapes Us (1992) using thousands of straight pins hammered into a wall, each pin hung with one strand of human hair. In Papa (1995) Miller has videotaped herself holding a childhood photograph of herself and her father, which she then proceeds to eat. In the background, one can hear Miller's voice humming a Yiddish lullaby which was sung to her as a child by her father. An exploration of her relationship with her father, Papa examines his profound influence on the construction of her Jewish identity. Also in 1995 Miller created Every Word, Their Name, using her pin and hair technique to spell out ghostly names on gallery walls. "The work in this exhibit began with the name of a child that never was. Pulled from darkness before it was fully formed there was not time for name and child to give meaning and form to one another . . . . This name pierces the gallery wall. It is accompanied by a chorus of others drawn from relatives remembered and imagined" (1993). Her 1997 exhibition, Chorus, continued this exploration of her personal history and the history of Judaism, consisting of three installations: the Kaddish mourning prayer of 99 crystal Hebrew letters arranged on a flat ebony tombstone (a Kaddish for her mother-in-law and for Holocaust victims), a solitary pew on a rectangular platform, and the Papa video from 1995. Miller is currently a fine arts instructor at Concordia University in Montréal.

Every Word, Their Name
YYZ Artists' Outlet, Toronto, Ontario

L'Excès
Musée régional de Rimouski, Rimouski, Québec

Les présents relatifs
Centre d'art contemporain Rueil-Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison, France; Quartier Éphémère, Montréal, Québec

Dancing with the Leviathan
Toronto, Ontario

Scratching the Surface
Art in General, New York, New York

Bereft
Hallwalls, Buffalo New York; Spaces, Cleveland, Ohio

From Memory to Transformation (Jewish Women's Voices Conference)
Toronto, Ontario

Définition, situation, expiration
Centre d'art contemporain de Basse-Normandie, Hérouville, Sainte-Clair, France

Monuments in the Present Tense
Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario

Textiles, That is to Say
Museum for Textiles, Toronto, Ontario; OR Society, Vancouver, British Columbia

In the Seam
Art Access Now, Toronto Eaton Centre, Toronto, Ontario; Cours Mont-Royal, Montréal, Québec

Last Chance
Saw Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario

For the Women
Morgentaler Clinic, Halifax, Nova Scotia

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Cier, Bernard, Olivier Zahm, and Joël Hubaut, eds. Définition, situation, expiration: Lionel Fourneaux, Wendy Jacob, Hervé Leforestier, Mindy Yan Miller. Hérouville, Saint-Clair, France: Centre d'art contemporain de Basse-Normandie, 1995.

Couëlle, Jennifer. "Les présents relatifs." Parachute 90 (April/May/June 1998): 40-42.

Dion, François, and Didier Boone. Les présents relatifs: Josée Bernard, Carol Bouchard, Philippe Laleu, Frédérique Decombe, Mindy Yan Miller et Christine Monceau. Rueil-Malmaison, France: Centre d'art contemporain de Rueil-Malmaison et Montréal, Québec: Quartier éphémère, 1998.

Farrell, Carolyn Bell. Chorus. Toronto, Ontario: The Koffler Gallery, 1997.

Fortin, Sylvie. Bereft. Buffalo, New York: Hallwalls, 1996.

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---. "I Fell Asleep." Harbour Magazine 1, no.3 (1991): 9-13.

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---. "Home is where the heart is." World Art no.4 (1995): n.p.

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