ALLISON MILLER

Blood Knot (2023) by Allison Miller operates as a visual proposition rather than a resolved image,
showcasing the instability of meaning and the ambiguous nature of interpretation. The painting engages
processes of emergence and closure, where forms appear to organize themselves only to defer legibility.
Composed of arcs, fragments of foliage, directional marks, and suspended objects such as coins and
pins, the work suggests a diagrammatic order that is continually undermined. Its visual language
gestures toward systems of containment, value, and orientation, yet none remain fixed; each
component enters relations that are temporary and in flux. The painting’s surface becomes an arena
where coherence and disarticulation coexist, where the act of interpretation is both invited and
rendered uncertain.

Miller’s practice often turns on this tension between structural logic and its undoing. In Blood Knot, the
motifs of attachment (threads, pins, leaves) enact an ambivalent play of cohesion and dispersal. The
safety pins imply both the promise of connection and the fragility of what is held. Coins invoke value but
hover outside transactional context, displaced from their function. Organic and diagrammatic registers
overlap without resolving into hierarchy or sequence.

Rather than representing collapse as failure, Blood Knot reconfigures it as an ongoing state of
negotiation. Meaning is not located within the image but generated through the viewer’s oscillation
between reading and unreading. The work thus operates as a site of epistemic suspension; a model for
how perception and interpretation might remain perpetually in process. Blood Knot articulates a mode
of painting that resists closure: not a stable signifying system, but an evolving field where interpretation
is continually deferred and reconstituted.