Miles Neidinger

Neidinger, born in July of 1976 in Kansas City MO, graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2000 with a BFA in sculpture. His artistic visualization has been informed by his experience in the commercial and industrial electrical industry. As an electrician he has discovered real life functions for color-coding, tape, conduit bending, and installations, the utilization of trigonometry, algebraic equations, and geometric functions. These experiences drastically inform his artistic practice. Recent exhibitions include: The Anatomy of the Palace of Wisdom City Ice Arts in Kansas City MO, Art in the Pro Flatiron Building New York NY (presented by Sprint), Museum Interrupted Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park KS, An Associate Degree in Science Finch Gallery in Chicago IL, What’s the Matter with Kansas Rare Gallery in New York NY, Family Event Home for the Holidays Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City MO, Charlotte Street Fund Exhibition Johnson County Community Collage in Overland Park KS. Neidinger is an Arts KC and Rocket grant recipient, an Art Through Architecture participant, a Charlotte Street Foundation Award recipient and was granted a Vermont Studio Center residency in 2001. His work has been published in Art in America, The Kansas City Star, Review Magazine, and Pitch Weekly.

The crummiest materials are employed in this work, yet it insists on formal purity; it is a sinister response to a cultural drive to consume excessively, and organize according to object-hood. Although this work employ textures, space, and color to draw us in, it never remains solely dependent upon the materials employed. I ask the viewer to uplift banal material to the realm of beauty. Living several months of my youth among a home remodeling project had a great influence on my work. Being surrounded by clusters of debris, living in a partially deconstructed home influenced my methods of perception. For months I witnessed the tearing out of walls, exposing the raw studs, plumbing pipes, and electrical wiring. My home had an anatomy, and I was helping my parents tear off its skin exposing the skeleton. Reversals are staged between oppositional forces of banality and beauty, synthetic and organic, repulsion and attraction. The work criticizes excess by being excessive. By holding a mirror up for the public to see themselves, I reveal my own proclivities. This notion of enlightenment achieved through the staging of reversals is described in William Blake’s 1790 poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, where he writes, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”.  The world I have come to see is not covered with items available for evaluation and ranking, but is an endless sheet of categorically synthesized matter that drapes over our environmental landscape.

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