Lori Miles: Baptized in Sugar

In Lori Miles' own words:

*This will be my first solo show in Indianapolis in ten years.

*The show is called Baptized in Sugar, and is a visual memoir of growing up in a house with a unique kind of privilege: we were saturated in unconditional love and allowed boundless exercise of our own free will.

*That kind of love makes the rest of the world, forever, pale in comparison.

*My parents let my sisters and I spend an entire summer trying to dig our own swimming pool in the backyard (it ended up being nearly 3 feet deep and about 10 feet across, lined with trash bags, and required a constant stream of water from the hose just to allow us to rest in a mud pit). We could cook whenever we want, but we never used recipes, we just messed up the kitchen inventing horrible concoctions and baking them. I still do not know the actual rules to board games, because in our house, we could mix pieces between games, make up our own rules, and the winner was determined by democratic vote.

*The show includes several sculptures (like a 14-foot tootsie pop called "Death Wish Summer", 2019), photographs, videos, paintings, and one ceramic pig with a pink fur jacket ("You're No Esau", 2019).

*The experiences described are not quite factual, but pulled from a combination of memories and impressions (some of my own and some I'm sure I borrowed- with three sisters and one brother, you never really know. Some memories even turned out to be dreams (there was no clown painting on my bedroom wall as an infant, but I recreated it for this show anyway)).

*In general, my work does not concern itself with truth. The truth is just waiting to be proven wrong, The world of the fake- copies, replicas, plastic tchotchkes- these things know themselves to be false. Fake things can never be proven true, and in that way, they are the most honest things I know.

*For instance, I prefer plastic animals to real ones. In fact, I have a famous distaste for real animals. They reek of the real world. A statue of an animal is neutral, lovable, permanent. I can project whatever I want onto it and it can handle the burden.

*I don't care about craft: I have no interest in impressing an audience with how good I am at something. The real challenge, to me, is to make viewers care about something I didn't make, something that knowingly exhibits only a level of craft that could be achieved from a short youtube video. To that purpose, much of the work that looks prefabricated is actually made and vis-versa.

*If my art is any good at all, the audience will think my work is no good at all. At least at first.