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Launch Party: RIME

Saturday March 13, 2010 @ 7 PM in the Main Space

Do you lay awake at night contemplating the possibility of cryptozoological life on the moon of Jupiter?  Chris Millar does.

Europa, an ice covered moon of the planet Jupiter, has been hypothesized to possess a massive ocean under its frozen shell. Scientists consider Europa’s oceanic interior to be the most likely location for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

RIME is a new work that imagines a NASA probe, called a cryobot, which travels to Jupiter’s moon in search of microbial life. Instead, it finds a planet engulfed in civil war between nomadic frost burned outlanders and a pelagic polycephalic porpoise prince.

Will protagonists Viscount Kemperhawk, Frumos, and Wasabi Guy penetrate the Europan ice shell and accost Balaur and his frothing porpoise hoards and cease the oppression of Europan outlanders? Find out at this one-night-only event @ TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary before Chicagoan art collectors swallow it up.

Chris Millar

Chris Millar was born in Claresholm, Alberta and currently lives and works in Calgary. He completed a Fine Arts Diploma in 1998 at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton, Alberta and his BFA at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary in 2000.

Painted with gestures of excess, Millar's works are immoderate, and at heart, ridiculous. Pulling from formal influences such as comic books, rock music, video games, television, the art world and pop culture in general, Millar’s paintings put spoof through a blender, chewing up narrative arcs and spitting them back out in a vortex of idiom, ribaldry and farce. Building his paintings through a multitude of processes and acrylic layers, Millar’s craft is impeccable. His fetishistic, outrageously decadent illustrations of human-folly are both overwhelming and seductive, the ultimate construction for a turbo-culture world.