Last Wednesday I buzzed in and up to Easton Miller‘s Ukrainian Village apartment to check out some of his newest work. I’d first seen his paintings in the Fever Dream show up at Roots & Culture, and was pointed his way for a studio visit by Jacob Goudreault, fellow Fever Dream participant and the last artist who’s studio I’d visited. Up the stairs I was greeted by a pair of french bulldogs and a righteous art collection, with (among others) Joel Dean‘s A Red Summer of Love over the couch and Dom Garritano’s One Half-Hour After Sunset in the kitchen, both pieces having once hung at Thrones Gallery, the West Loop space Miller ran from September 2008 to May 2009.

Like Goudreault, Miller is a recent SAIC graduate and part of the emerging group of Chicago artists working on hybridizing painting and sculpture. To Miller, materials matter just as much for their unique structural phenomena as for their interactivity with paint, and the products in his studio looked like an appropriate mix of Home Depot and Utrecht with pond sealer beside raw pigment. Miller talked about all his tools and their uses with equal familiarity, describing in strings of rubbery polys and prenes the arduous kitchen floor processes for rendering the plastic paint for Blue Ribbon (state fair)’s weaved cake crust,  or the painter’s nightmare of covering every interior detail in the foaming shit curls of Decisions.

Downstairs, in a clamp-lit section of his building’s basement appropriated by Miller and friends as extra studio space, Miller showed me some of the pieces he’s preparing for False Anatomies, coming up later this month at LVL3. The two I saw were pretty freaky – big pahoehoe surfaces of some kind of insulation foam, fuzzy with layered shades of black or brown flock, one with three embedded half-closed blood eyes, the other with a caldera socket built to fit a taxidermy eyeball. Though somewhere less than finished, they’re cool to see, hard not to touch, and part of a rapidly evolving body of paintings.  As long as the toxicity of his materials or airborne flock doesn’t pick him off, it’ll be interesting to see where Miller’s work goes to next.

You can Easton Miller‘s work later this month in False Anatomies, opening Saturday, March 20th @ LVL3, or until March 27th in Fever Dream @ Roots & Culture.