A husband-and-wife team from Wichita, Kansas, has transformed a Kansas City gallery into a colorful playground of interactive artworks that aspire to impress visitors from outer space.
At the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in the Crossroads, a spiny red spider topped with locust seed pods shimmies with the turn of a crank, and visitors can jiggle a massive prairie rock that bounces on a pair of springs. In a back corner of the main gallery, two industrial fans inflate a 42-foot-long, floor-to-ceiling tent made from 35 tie-dyed sheets.
The show — "When the Extraterrestrials come, they will judge us by the quality of our Art!” — is the work of sculptor Mike Miller and his wife, installation artist Meghan Miller.
“This interaction between the natural world, the mechanical world and the man-made world,” Mike Miller says, “that's part of all my work.”
For him everything is a machine: a tree, a rock, a river.
"There's natural machines that are made in nature, and then there's man-made machines,” he says.
In contrast to the exhibit’s mechanical edges, Meghan Miller created soft environments using color and fabric.
“I like to create spaces for people to interact with others, or to be alone, to be somewhere magical,” she says. “I hope the art I make can on some level be a place that’s free to visit where you can come hang out for a little bit.”
Though the couple often works together, this collaboration is their first large-scale show, and it has Mike and Meghan contemplating an audience beyond the earthly realm.
“I like the idea that when the extraterrestrials come, they will judge us by the quality of our art,” Mike explains. “Everybody should behave as though the aliens are watching us.”
With his sculptures, built with found and salvaged objects, Mike Miller says he wants to send a message to intelligent life forms that, as a species, we are taking responsibility for our home planet.
To impress any potential alien visitors, he’s created a rusty barrel that spins on a metal stand, and a pair of aluminum fish with limestone heads hanging from the ceiling. His goal, Mike says, is to delight
“It used to be that the works were kinetic and powered by electricity, and now they're powered by people,” he says. “I always want my work to surround people or to become a place for them to be in.”
At the couple’s 43-acre farm near Towanda, about 25 miles northeast of Wichita, Kansas, friends often drop old machinery and metal off with Mike because they know he’ll eventually find a way to use it.
“I can point to, you know: Barry gave me this, and Mark gave me that,” he says. “I got 90% of that stuff I will never use, but I got to keep it all, and it's just tons and tons and tons of stuff out there.”
Meghan also uses responsibly-sourced material methodically in her work, and her bold use of color has influenced her husband’s rusty aesthetic.
“Mike's work has gotten more colorful in recent years with colors popping up,” she says. “It's almost like he has to have color now.”
She scoured thrift stores to source the fabric for the large inflatable tent before tie-dyeing it with vibrant colors. Then, she assembled it into a 40-foot square — a “tie-flatable,” she calls it.
“It's the biggest thing I've ever sewn, ” Meghan says.
The result is a tie-dyed, prairie-inspired landscape visitors can step into.
“I was happiest when the fabric looked like a sunset or a bright, sunny day over a field or something,” she says. “I also used greeny grays, thinking about a thunderstorm or a hail cloud, and trying to reproduce the way the sky feels during a storm.”
At first, she wasn’t sure if the material would be light enough to stay aloft, but her husband’s mechanical mind stepped in with a solution.
“It's really been fun collaborating,” Mike says. “Meghan did all the tie-dye, all the sewing, and then I worked out how the blowers work and so on.”
Like an extraterrestrial elf on a shelf
Mike even created a corps of multi-limbed creatures to keep an eye on the show. They’re perched on shelves around the gallery.
“Everyone should have one of these little ceramic alien deities on a shelf in their house in case the real aliens judge us harshly,” he says, explaining with a laugh that they some day could serve as an insurance policy.
“If the aliens come, and they look around, they’ll go: ‘Oh, the people living in this house are cool, so we don't need to beam them up,’” Mike says.
A close encounter of that kind is an inevitability, he says.
“Aliens have got to be out there,” Mike says. “There's just too much real estate for there to be no aliens.”
"When the Extraterrestrials come, they will judge us by the quality of our Art!” runs through Friday, May 29 at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, 2012 Baltimore Ave., Kansas City, Missouri 64108. For more information visit the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center website.
