Aesthetics of the Archives

March 7 - August 23, 2020

Art Gallery of Burlington, Canada

Community Gallery

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Aesthetics of the Archives explores the Caribbean and European ancestry of Canadian Artist/Researcher Desmond A. Miller. Through a focus on his paternal family’s location within the Black Diaspora, Miller draws on personal, family and institutional archives to create representations of family elders. In Aesthetics of the Archives, he uses poetry, photography, and textiles to disrupt linear ideas of time, trouble fixed notions of archives and invite pathways for being in good relation with the other-than-human world.

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Artist Talks

​Death Dying and the Ancestors

with Danielle F. Lobo

August 13, 2020

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Ritual and Earth Connection

with Jess Miller

August 17, 2020

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Exhibition Text

​Ritual, Process and Ancestral Homelands

by Alyssa Fearon

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Story Time

​A behind-the-scenes look at influences for Aesthetics of the Archives

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Desmond A. Miller is a recipient of the John Willard Fibre Arts Residency at the Art Gallery of Burlington.

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In the summer of 2014 the Art Gallery of Burlington proudly launched the John Willard Fibre Arts Residency to celebrate the remarkable life of John Willard. Not one to follow the rules of tradition, Willard turned the craft of quilting into a truly remarkable art form. To continue Willard’s legacy as a fibre art teacher, the residency enables artists to have access to one of the AGB resident fibre studios in order to develop a body of work for a solo exhibition in the Community Gallery.

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Image credits:

Left: Nana (archive), 2020. Digital inkjet print on silk chiffon. © Desmond A. Miller
Right: Nana (contemporary), 2020. Digital inkjet print. © Desmond A. Miller