"Skins": Rebekah Miller

Rebekah Miller's installation Skins, comprised of a fabric house and hollow birch-bark trees, will be displayed at The New Gallery from January 4 to February 2, 2013. The house and trees are real objects, but on closer inspection the house floats away and the trees are hollow. Skins explores our undeniable yet tenuous, fraught yet integral, connections to our homes and to the idea of home.

Originally from Buck Lake, Alberta, Miller received her BFA in Print Media from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. She went on to receive her MFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Miller currently lives and works in Dawson City, Yukon.

"There is no firmer connection between humanity and its world than the idea of home," Miller explains. "Home lies in the roots of our memory." It is these ideas of home, its importance and yet the way that we are always leaving it, our effort to rebuild it and our inability to adequately do so that Miller explores in her work. Thus, she says, "this fabric house does not protect and these stitched trees cannot grow. These trees, like the ghosting of my house, are but fragile shells of what they once were. They are just skins."