AGE: 30
BASED IN: New York
Shala Miller just wants to get a handle on it.
Through video, photographs, sculpture, and poetry, Miller attempts to understand their big feelings, primal drives, and shocking interpersonal experiences. Take, for example, the photograph Likeness Unidentified, 2022, a broken bust in which the artist’s naked torso holds an inscrutable pose—either self-pleasure or self-protection. Or video works like Mrs. Lovely and Mourning Chorus, both 2021, where fictitious characters played by Miller, or the artist as themself, sing of devastating hurts.
As a painfully shy child in Cleveland, Ohio, who sang in two local youth choirs, Miller secretly dreamed of a career as a performer but lacked the confidence to audition for solo spots. When their mother received a digital video camera as a retirement gift, Miller discovered a tool that would finally help them open up.
At 13, they began making self-portraits and obsessively compiling an archive of their parents’ lives. Soon, with guidance from their older sister, they downloaded a simple photo-editing software and began experimenting with placing text on top of images. Inspired by a community of other kids who shared pictures from their lives on Blogspot and Flickr, Miller saw image-making as their way to perform.
For the artist, who also sings original compositions under the name Freddie June, voice is the purest form of expression. “I didn’t know you could shape a voice as if it was a material,” they say. Their resulting monologues are rooted less in the confessional culture of social media than in the vulnerable testimonials of jazz singer Betty Carter or playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins.
A recent project, Obsidian—a collection of lithographs, double-exposed photographs, and palm-sized 3D-printed sculptures based on the artist’s crew of alter egos—offers Miller a more tangible way to examine the limits of self-portraiture and self-exposure. “I like having something in my hands,” they say, “literally or metaphorically.”
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