Throw-Up, 2012

Shelley Miller - Montreal, Canada

Installation

Opening up urban spaces to unique encounters between private and city life, Shelley Miller works with a distinctive personal brand of tagging using edible icing to adorn city walls with ornate scrolls and decorative motifs. As a form of inscribing the shifting meanings and uses of urban space, Miller takes graffiti’s decorative dimensions to an extreme, adorning the visual landscape with the same technique that one would a cake complete with swirling piped borders and edible roses. Working on urban surfaces, the “throw-up” – in street vocabulary a large graffiti tag created quickly  – will be created on site by Miller and her team of assistants, using her characteristic design that is a stylistic blend of classical decorative motifs with a contemporary edge.

Miller has been working with sugar for more than 10 years in her site-specific practice, engaging with issues of spectacle, consumer culture, excess, waste as well as the historical links between sugar and slavery. She has created installations across Canada and in sites internationally; recent projects include permanent public art commissions in Montreal for the École des métiers du tourisme in downtown Montreal and the new Montreal-North Train Station for the Metropolitan Transport Authority.

Based in Montreal, Shelley Miller received her Bachelor of Arts at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary and her MFA from Concordia University. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, the Commonwealth Arts and Crafts Award for research and exhibition purposes in India and the Sacatar Fellowship to attend the Sacatar Residency in Brazil. Miller’s work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad.

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Metro Hall, 55 John Street (Accessible from King Street West, east of John Street)

This project is outdoors.