S E B A S T E I N M I L L E R
C I V I L D I S O B E D I E N C E
Curated by Carla Garnet
Essay by Phillip Dwight Morgan
Presented by the JOHN B. AIRD GALLERY in partnership with the Scotiabank CONTACT Festival of Photography
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, April 8 to Friday, June 18, 2021
Open to the public Wednesday, to Friday, 2 to 5 pm by appointment, Email <director@airdgallery.
Sebastein Miller’s Civil Disobedience variously references photojournalism, album art, protest imagery, comic books, films, and video games. The use of digital montage foregrounds his works’ constructed nature, highlighting the gaps between posited futures and depictable reality. Through animated counter-narratives, the Toronto-based artist uses satire to comment on science, race, and the nature of resistance, and to analyze how Black North American icons circulate in popular culture.
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Toronto-born artist Sebastein Miller is most recognized for his recent body of work entitled Civil Disobedience. Miller’s new-media-practice involves sampling and mixing digital pop-culture imagery with social-political symbols, and collage-parties. In Civil Disobedience, the artist constructs photomontages that re-think the histories of the twentieth-century using Afro-Futurist emblems and found imagery. Miller’s work provocatively explores some of the key tensions in contemporary culture from a Black male perspective. Variously referencing photojournalism, album-art, protest-imagery, comic-books, films, and video-games; the cut-out style of his practice foregrounds the works’ constructed nature highlighting the gaps between the images’ posited futures and currently depictable reality.
Phillip Dwight Morgan is a Toronto-based freelance writer of Jamaican heritage. His essays, op-eds, and analysis have been featured in The Walrus, CBC, The Toronto Star, HuffPost Canada, and Maclean’s, among others. Phillip views writing as an act of political resistance and emancipation.
