I am a collector, an organizer, and a densifier of surfaces.

     I began this work in May 2001, though the seeds of discontent had been placed inside me years before. Desiring to lose some of my ego, I implemented the automatic technique of "frottage" (French for "rubbing"). It was an invention of Max Ernst's (a displaced German), during the heyday of the surrealist 1920's.
     In May 2001 I sat in a metal chair in my semi-secluded backyard and rubbed my first frottages with a graphite stick. The bricks, the tree bark, the picnic table, the metal chair I was sitting on, the street lamp I'd picked up off the ground years before, all yielded images through the textural sense that were barely visible to the eye. Touching becomes a new seeing.
     Frottage is about the organization of chance elements - whatever is in the environment is the goddamn goods: what else is there? Frottage makes the world easier to project meaning on to.
     There are some similarities to music in this work for me: the searching aspect of improvisation and the discovery involved. The way that one must somehow conclude, causing the materials to interact in a cohesive fashion, what one has started. To this end, I always add some intentional hand-drawing to bring out the underlying "meaning" of the piece. Conscious control is minimal, but previously veiled ideas and psychic elements are uncovered - this has more than a slight connection to dreams (I have composed a number of musical "Dream Interpretations" over the years). And I leave these elements in a highly ambiguous state intentionally - rather than fixing an image to a "known emotive charge", I prefer to leave the eye-pools open to interpretation. Vertigo.

     It amuses me on a daily basis.

     Roger C. Miller
     Dec.2002