Made In L.A. is coming to the Hammer, Barnsdall Park, LAXART, and billboards around town on June 2 and will showcase sixty emerging, under-recognized Los Angeles artists–one of which will be voted to win a $100,000 prize. In order to help you make an educated vote this summer, we’re counting down to Made In L.A. by showcasing each artist participating in the biennial.

Allison Miller is a Los Angeles painter who works within the space of large, abstract paintings.

Miller’s work are highly non-objective, featuring recurring lines and shapes but in no particular order and without a particular reason to them. Her works are vaguely geometrical in the sense that they constantly feature morphed boxes and Xs, which come together to form patterns at points or which seem to monopolize the piece, as the final two works here show. She also seeks to be undefined in her painting, not limited to just paint as she’s been known to use dirt in her art to mimic certain textures and feelings in her painting.

Her work also seems inadvertently very Los Angeles. In an interview she did with Huffington Post earlier this year, she mentions her love for Griffith Park, the influence of movies on her, the light and space, and even the ridiculousness of the city and of the idea that artwork can be “Californian,” as she finds local artists to not be “just mellow
optimists out here” and “not simply responding to the weather.” Her work–and many of her Made In L.A. peers–stand as a testament to this, nothing about it even related to California.

Miller’s art are very straightforward paintings without obvious agendas. This is interesting because we’re finding her style of art is in the minority at Made In L.A. as it seems the majority of artists work in a heavy conceptual space that can very often require a lot of buying in from a viewer. She requires a lot from her viewer as well but in different ways, since she makes “objects that seem to fail to achieve one goal and inadvertently succeed in achieving another, unanticipated goal.” We know viewers will be able to handle her work quite well.