Spectra In White: Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller is the artist behind a project called “Brand Spirit.” He chose 100 consumer objects, from a Remington bullet to a Barbie doll, and painted out their surfaces in pale gray,  removing all markings and logos. Then he photographed them against a matching background, so barely anything but their basic form registers. All 100 went up on his Tumblr site, and two of them are for sale as limited-edition prints from the inexpensive-fine-art site 20×200. And of those two, I had to have one:

The series is meant to make us examine the ways we interact with consumer culture, of course. (The blanked-out can of Red Bull, turned into nothing more than a smooth cylinder with ridges at the ends, made me laugh out loud.) But this particular example also says something about obsolescence, bankruptcy, relic worship, loss. That camera was, after all, a machine for making memory physical, and sometimes making great art, and today it is essentially mute.