Ariel Stinks (50 Alternative Album Covers to Thrash and Burn)
Jill Miller is a visual artist who works across a wide range of media, from video installations to public practices, and many hybrids in between. She often collaborates with individuals and local communities in the form of public interventions, workshops, and participatory community projects. Her work is playful, and she uses humor as a strategy for opening up meaningful conversations about difficult subjects. In past work, she: lived in the remote wilderness in search of the mythical creature Bigfoot, assisted mothers who were harassed for breastfeeding in public, and organized teenage girls who were closing the gender gap by learning to edit Wikipedia. Her recent work, My Mother’s Titanium Hip, is a digital collage that blends video conference footage with text messages and 3D models. Born in Illinois, Miller received her MFA in from University of California, Los Angeles and her BA from University of California, Berkeley, in English. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and collected in public institutions worldwide including CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In 2019, she received an Artists in Communities Grant from the California Arts Council to create the first commissioned socially engaged artwork at the Palo Alto Art Center and the Mitchell Park Library. Miller is the founding director of Art Practice’s new public practices venue, Platform Artspace, and she oversees the Worth Ryder Art Gallery and Undergraduate Honors Studios (with Asma Kazmi). She is on the executive committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), and she is affiliated faculty at the Berkeley Food Institute and Global Urban Humanities. At Berkeley, she has taught courses in social practices, food activism, Junior Seminar, Senior Projects, several Special Topics courses, and BCNM graduate seminars.
Sixteen years ago, American musician Ariel Pink took a photo of artist Jill Miller and featured the portrait on the cover of his Thrash and Burn album with ‘Ariel Stinks’ scrawled across her forehead, without asking her permission. This fact is certainly a violation of law, but the precedent speaks for more. For many decades creative industries have used the bodies and faces of women, not always illegally, as in our case, but as a cheap and insignificant resource. The NFT drop by Jill Miller is a strong and witty act of resistance, performed by her in collaboration with artificial intelligence. 50 Alternative Covers to Thrash and Burn is a continuation of the Ariel Stinks line, which was started by the musician himself. In these fifty humorous works, Pink is associated with literal stinky objects: bacteria breeding, a pet skunk, and a public bathroom. In stark contrast to the way women are commodified in the music industry, Ariel's face is rendered bloated and misshapen, giving a powerful critique of the capitalist music industry. In addition, the conflict between Miller and Pink is also the same conflict between two generations of media production. The drop is scheduled for January 2023, two years after Trump's supporters attacked the US capitol. Pink, who participated in the ”Stop the Steal” rally, is known for his notorious connection with Fox News. While he represents the old patriarchal media, Jill Miller uses new media and tools that hopefully reserve more room for women's creativity.
