Miller's 'Thieves' enlivens lost images; Johnson's sculptures take risks that pay off

A roll of film that slid out of the pocket of a thief ransacking a car became the property of the victim. Those who posed for the pictures never saw them. If they stop by Howard House, however, they'll see themselves transformed. They are the subjects of a new series of Mark Takamichi Miller paintings titled "Thieves."

Like Kerry James Marshall's "Lost Boys" from the early 1990s, Miller's figures derive from the ancient tradition of elegiac portraiture. But while Marshall's figures wear halos as retrospective tributes, Miller's are alive in the chaos of their time and place. They are stains within the larger stains of their collective lives.

While Marshall's oil paintings are small and succinct, Miller's are large and unraveled. They push against the contradictions of their creation, these unlikely combinations of acrylic gel, wax, urethane, oil, color markers and glass spheres.

In the 1990s, Miller confined himself to high-impact, oil-paint abstraction, bulbous forms in fluid and creamy conjunction. When he moved to the figure, he didn't want to turn his silky charms loose on it. Instead, he treated the bodies of his subjects as pause points in which paint pooled.

Wrinkled like crocodiles, these early figures are bas-relief sculptures made almost entirely of paint, created on glass and scraped off with dental floss. In his latest series, he combines the grace of his abstractions with the blunt force of his bodies.

Miller is not entirely comfortable with what he knows how to do and likes to keep his skill in check. If he chose, he could deliver a credible version of Bay Area Figurative enlivened with a touch of Gerhard Richter. Instead, he employs conceptual restraints to focus his subject matter and different material approaches to each series.

All his figures are anonymous, derived from packets of film left at the processer or taken from discarded family albums, but the characters in "Thieves" are doubly lost. They are clues to a crime and evidence of their own on-edge style.

"Man at a Party" lives in a fallout zone. His white shirt is a furious kind of weather, and his youth gives him a golden glow that sours across the blank expanse of his features.

In "Two Men at a Party," at least there's camaraderie. The duo occupy the bottom right-handed corner of an unprimed canvas. They are fevered to the point of transparency but thick, like smoke rings from cancerous lungs. A pit bull has its own painting. As it looks up at the camera, its white eyes are unguarded and its body is a grizzled scribble. Miller painted it as a shadow mist with a killer instinct.

"And down in lovely muck I've lain, happy till I rose again," wrote A.E. Housman. Miller's muck is also lovely, fully realized yet casual, true to its snapshot origins as it enlarges upon their meaning.

	"Grandpa," a 2008 sculpture by Sean M. Johnson.

Sean M. Johnson must have listened to a lot of children's verses as a child. He's interested in London's bridges falling down, but he gives them the illusion of a second chance to be functional. Each of his sculptures is a story complete without the telling. The risks he takes are associated with dance and so are his payoffs, those complete moments on the edge of a fall.

"Family Portrait" is a new form of grunge, an old couch taped halfway up a wall. The couch attests to physical sprawl and mental inertia, but has acquired art gravity through the Surrealist implications of its placement.

There are other artists who reassemble furniture to frame it in a new context, including, in Seattle, Roy McMakin and Drew Daly. Compared with their work, Johnson's is rough and tumble, Caliban to their Ariel.

"Love Seat" is a pair of overstuffed red chairs cut in half and joined. Because each lacks one leg, each needs the other. Johnson's version of coupled life requires each person to create an inadequate version of self to serve the unhealthy whole.

"Grandpa" is a rocking chair precariously balanced on a whiskey bottle. It's rock-a-bye, Grandpa, on the treetop. He's going down, but at this moment, alcohol keeps him aloft.

In the rear is "Thank you," a cluster of thank-you balloons holding up a lawn chair. The helium will leak away, but in the meantime, life is wonderful.