When Shayna Miller creates art, rituals become actions.

The NJ-based artist brings those rituals to life in the newest exhibit at the Warren County Community College Art Gallery, located on the second floor of the College’s main campus on Route 57 in Washington Township. The exhibit will be on display through Dec. 20.  

Miller, an award-winning artist who won the Stanley Prescott Hooper Memorial Prize in 2019 for promise and integrity in studio art, has had her works included in exhibits with Young Space and In/Passing  in New York City, and elsewhere. Her work has been published in The American Scholar, Young Space, and Paradice Palase.

Miller’s body of work explores her relationship to mysticism and the body, as well as an interest in process as ritual through painting and sculpture.

“Rituals are a set of actions,” said Miller, a graduate of Drew University who lives in Morris Plains. “They are often orderly, regular, and with purpose. The studio is the site of my personal investigations into ideas related to rituals. This entails the creation of boundaries and rules that I have chosen to abide by, a search for a solution through the obsessive nature of the process.”

Working primarily in oil paint, she notes that forms can easily be manipulated, subtracted, and altered. Actions of scrubbing and dragging paint across panel surfaces become an intimate and physical action of embodiment; the painting becomes body. Sculptural elements taken from domestic furniture and architecture explore other relations to the body. 

“My work is a vehicle for transformation, invoking powers of transubstantiation, through references to compositional devices employed in early modern religious and icon painting,” Miller said. “The process involves channeling my personal experiences and emotions in order to reach into spiritual dimensions to retrieve new forms and images. Paintings become capsules and cross-sections; they both contain and release talismanic energy, during and after their creation.”

The WCCC Art Gallery is free and open to the public during regular college hours. For more about WCCC and its art programs as well as general information about the College and directions, go to warren.edu. 

For more about Shayna Miller, visit www.shaynamiller.com.